An interesting point of the parasitic power of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has been very good at expanding into fields and subjects that are not limited to psychiatry or even medicine. It has influenced philosophy, literature, arts, even history. No other schools from psychiatry has acheived this status -- one could not imagine a Kraepelian literature or a Rorschah art criticism. Phenomenological or existentialist psychiatry might be a distant second, but they played a somewhat different game, with greatest philosophers on their line. Psychoanalysis is particularly strong as a parasite in social and psychological practices.
Osborne, T. (1993). "Mobilizing Psychoanalysis: Michael Balint and the General Practitioners." Social Studies of Science 23(1): 175-200.
“One of the very hallmarks of psychoanalysis as an endeavor is what might be called – without pejorative connotations – its parasitic power, its ability to graft on to other disciplines, to be taken up, mobilized and transformed at a distance from its origin. On the one hand, there is an epistemological mobilization, psychoanalysis as deployed in academic discipline such as philosophy and literary theory; on the other, psychoanalysis has been deployed as a model in a host of welfare disciplines centred on the family, sexuality, and emotional development. The most important site for this kind of concern in Britain has been the Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute for Human Relations in London.” 176.
