Neo-Freudianism

The Neo-Freudian psychiatrists and psychologists were a group of loosely linked American theorists of the mid-twentieth century, who were all influenced by Sigmund Freud, but who extended his theories, often in social or cultural directions. They have been defined as 'American writers who attempted to restate Freudian theory in sociological terms and to eliminate its connections with biology'.

The term "neo-Freudian" is sometimes loosely (but inaccurately) used to cover those early followers of Freud who at some point accepted the basic tenets of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis but later dissented from it. 'The best-known of these dissenters are Alfred Adler and Carl Jung...The Dissidents'.

The 'Independent Analysts' Group of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, as distinct from the Kleinians and what are now called the Contemporary Freudians', who include figures such as Christopher Bollas, D. W. Winnicott and Adam Phillips, are — like the ego-psychologists such as Heinz Hartmann or the intersubjectivist analysts in the States — perhaps best considered of as 'different schools of psychoanalytic thought', or as 'Post-Freudians...post-Freudian developments'.

It was only in a jocular, derogative way that one might have spoken in the Eighties of 'today's nouvelle vague neo-Freudians, Kernberg and Kohut'.

An interest in the social approach to psychodynamics was the major theme linking the so-called Neo-Freudians. Adler had perhaps been 'the first to explore and develop a comprehensive social theory of the psychodynamic self'; and 'after Adler's death, some of his views...came to exert considerable influence on neo-Freudian theory': indeed, it has been suggested of 'Horney and Sullivan...that these theorists could be more accurately described as "neo-Adlerians" than "neo-Freudians"'.

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