Dilemmas of psychoanalysis and psychology: critical conceptions of subjectivity in the work of Marie Jahoda

This article explores work that anticipates current interest in the development of ‘psychosocial studies’. Marie Jahoda’s Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology raises important questions about the historical and extant relationships between psychoanalysis and the discipline of psychology. This article traces those questions within two contextual frames. The first contextual frame comprises the historical vicissitudes of psychoanalysis and psychology from the 1930s through to the 1970s. Jahoda’s questions are rooted in a theoretical background that brings the tradition of German-speaking radical psychoanalysis into Anglo-American psychology. The second contextual frame is the development of ‘critical’ psychological attempts to recruit psychoanalysis for an alternative account of subjectivity from the 1980s through to the turn of the 21st century. Jahoda’s contribution, and its place as a ‘hinge-point’ between old and new conceptions of psychology, is to draw attention to the role of psychoanalytic ideas in the discipline and to provoke further critical reflection on Freud’s work today.