Neo-Freudianism is a psychoanalytic approach derived from the influence of Sigmund Freud but extending his theories towards typically social or cultural aspects of psychoanalysis over the biological.
[1] The neo-Freudian school of psychiatrists and psychologists were a group of loosely linked American theorists/writers of the mid-20th century "who attempted to restate Freudian theory in sociological terms and to eliminate its connections with biology.
"[4]: 61 Erik H. Erikson, for his part, stressed that "psychoanalysis today is…shifting its emphasis…to the study of the ego's roots in the social organisation," and that its method should be "what H. S. Sullivan called 'participant', and systematically so.
Karen Horney theorized that to deal with basic anxiety, the individual has three options:[14] The neo-Freudian Abram Kardiner was primarily interested in learning how a specific society acquires adaptation concerning its environment.
In the wake of such contemporary criticism, a "consistent critique levelled at most theorists cited above is that they compromise the intrapersonal interiority of the psyche;" but one may accept nonetheless that "they have contributed an enduring and vital collection of standpoints relating to the human subject.
"[19]: 109 A decade later, he would report that it had "developed along somewhat different paths than the psychotherapeutic views of Horney or Sullivan, or Alexander and French, yet there are many threads of interconnection with these modern formulations of psychoanalytic thinking.