Today’s blog focuses on a new area, one that deals with the relevance today of psychological intervention. This is a guest post (one of two posts) from Prof. Dov R. Aleksandrowicz, MD, former President of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society, and a Training and Supervising analyst at the Israel Institute. He is also a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association, and a recipient of the Gustav Bychowski Prize in Psychoanalysis. He is a founding member of the International Neuro-Psychoanalysis Society, and a co-founder of the Israeli Forum of Neuro-Psychoanalysis. He is the author of numerous professional publications, in five languages.
And yes, the name is not a coincidence – he is also my father.
The question of how much our lives are shaped by innate, presumably genetically determined factors, and how much by experience is not merely a fundamental philosophical issue, but also very much a practical one. Many of us make our living by teaching, healing, or otherwise trying to make the lives of our fellow men better. Are our claims justified? How many resources should society invest in intervention programs aimed at improving an individual’s quality of life or preventing emotional maladjustment?
The last century witnessed a dramatic surge in the understanding of the role of the environment, especially of early life experience, on the personality in general and on the emotional well-being specifically. This was mainly due to the flourishing of the Freudian psychoanalytic theory, but other theories, such as cognitive science and learning theory, placed equal emphasis on environmental influences and recommended environmental interventions.
The peak of this trend came in the middle of the century, when psychoanalysts turned their attention to the early stages of life and especially infancy. Infant observation produced prodigious evidence of the crucial importance of mothering for the well-being and the emotional development of the infant. Even physical development and survival itself may depend on adequate emotional environment (“good enough mothering”) as demonstrated dramatically by the observations of Renee Spitz and others. Such understanding led to a plethora of therapeutic theories and interventions, some of them, like infant-mother dyadic therapy, fairly grounded in clinical reality, others of dubious scientific and therapeutic validity, fads more than methods, like “anaclitic” or “primal scream” therapies.
The scientific pendulum began to swing the other way toward the end of the century. Revolutionary advances in brain imaging allowed us unprecedented insight into the functioning of the living brain and cast doubt on the validity of “functional” as opposed to “structural”, “or “organic”, malfunctioning (an issue to which we will return later). At the same time, more sophisticated genetic investigations led to a rapidly developing science of behavioral genetics and to the realization that much of what was attributed to parental influences is genetically determined, or at least co-determined. The unraveling of the human genome gave rise to a hope that some specific behavioral disorders (such as ADHD or antisocial personality disorder) will be demonstrated to be related to mutations in a specific set of genes.
In the next post, we’ll talk about why intervention is very much relevant in today’s modern world.