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A traditional ego-psychology analysis typically focuses on analyzing the patient’s inner life as the main source of problems. In contrast, a relational analyst emphasizes not only the patient’s inner life, but also the mutual relational dynamics of the therapeutic interaction in the session.

Freud’s thinking was also influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which emphasized individual organisms’ competitive struggle for survival.

Historically, however, psychoanalysis emerged in a specifically Western tradition of intellectual and social values. It is based on a philosophy of liberal individualism and thus has proved to be a therapeutic technique exhibiting constraints that have limited its applicability across cultures and classes.

Peter Kropotkin spend 5 years observing animals in the wilds of Siberia, and having read Darwin, sought to replicate his opersations of the competitive struggle of species in the wild.

Psychoanalysis is profoundly influenced by and in turn influences the social, economic, cultural, and political contexts in which it is practiced. Although created as a therapy for individual suffering, psychoanalysis has also always contained important implications for the progressive development of a more humane society and has defined its cures ... See more

We must also include in our clinical theories the psychological misery occasioned by actual and often ongoing experiences of social oppression. In part, such socialized misery may be internalized and perpetuated by an individual’s use of mechanisms such as identification with the aggressor, dissociation, denial, and projective identification, which... See more

In the spirit of its time, traditional psychoanalysis consisted of an authoritarian analyst–patient relationship and promulgated values such as a scientific approach to human affairs, the affirmation of paternalistic gender roles, individual achievement, personal responsibility, and a strongly bounded self.

We can no longer operate on the assumption that the Western capitalist culture of self-contained individualism is superior to all other cultural forms and continue to encode those values in the practice of psychoanalysis.

On Darwin's influence of Psychoanalysis