Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

http://apa.sagepub.com/ The Dilemma of Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Toward a ''Knowing'' Post-Postmodernism

Aner Govrin J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2006 54: 507 DOI: 10.1177/00030651060540020801 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa.sagepub.com/content/54/2/507

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THE DILEMMA OF CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYSIS: TOWARD A KNOWING POST-POSTMODERNISM

It is in the best interest of psychoanalysis that new schools of thought (earlier examples of which are the classical, Kleinian, and self psychological perspectives) evolve. Generating a new school of thought, however, is almost impossible in this postmodern era. The postmodern paradigm in psychoanalysis (intersubjectivity, dialectical constructivism, twoperson psychology) does not strive to generate a true theory of mind that claims to fit reality, nor does it claim to be another school of thought. The creators of the classical, interpersonal, self psychological, ego psychological, Kleinian, Bionian, Fairbairnian, Winnicottian, and other schools cannot be postmodernists, for they all believed that their theories corresponded to reality and were therefore true. A shortage of analysts who know the truth today will make it extremely difficult for new schools of thought to arise in psychoanalysis, or for new and compelling theories and descriptions of the human psyche to be constructed. What is required is for pluralistic psychoanalytic institutions to empower analysts who are actively involved in the pursuit of new ideas and theories in psychoanalysis.

n the past fifteen years, with the decline of positivism in psychoanalysis, a new postmodern paradigm has evolved. One of the most important implications of this paradigm (variously called intersubjectivity, dialectical constructivism, or two-person psychology) is that it casts doubt on values such as objective knowledge, truth, and correspondence to reality. It encourages analysts to be more authentic, uncertain, and subjective in their thinking and clinical stance (Aron
Faculty, Department of Hermeneutics, Bar Ilan University; clinical psychologist, Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Submitted for publication October 31, 2003.
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1996; Hoffman 1998; Mitchell 1991, 1993, 1997; Spezzano 1997). This postmodern turn in psychoanalysis ref lects the more general and broad shifting of views in Western culture toward a rejection of general laws and truths in favor of local, unique, personal, and contextualized truths. The new postmodern paradigm is focused primarily on the subjectivity of the psychoanalytic encounter, and does not attempt to generate another true theory of mind claiming to fit reality, nor does it claim to be a school of thought (like the classical, Kleinian, or self psychological perspectives). This paper examines the heavy price psychoanalysis might pay if the majority of analysts adopt postmodernism as their preferred epistemology. The contention is that only analysts who thought they knew the truth created the classical, interpersonal, self psychological, ego psychological, Kleinian, Bionian, Fairbairnian, Winnicottian, and other schools of thought. These positivist perspectives gave rise to compelling and complex theories of the mind. Their creators believed that their formulations corresponded to reality. The arguments I will present here proceed through four main stages of development. First, I compare the positivist image of knowledge in the era of psychoanalytic schools with the image of knowledge endorsed by contemporary psychoanalysis. Second, I explain why the era in which the older schools of thought were created was enormously rich, fertile, and creative. I propose two conditions that, in my view, are necessary for the creation of new schools. Third, I examine three contemporary writers who criticize the most basic tenet of all psychoanalytic schools of thoughtthe existence of causal relations between childhood events and transference. I conclude by suggesting that psychoanalysis move to a third phase, beyond modernism and postmodernism, one that can promote the construction of new theories and yet be sensitive to questions of knowledge. I propose here that the problem with psychoanalytic schools was that they had disciples and followers, rather than a group of investigators trying to validate findings or elaborate them. Only a fundamental change in psychoanalytic organizations and institutions can help psychoanalysis become a science and an academic clinical discipline. The terms positivism and postmodernism are used throughout this paper, though I am aware that their usage is vague and highly ambiguous. I have chosen these philosophical terms because of their direct
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association with images of knowledge, and their association, respectively, with the possibility and impossibility of knowing the truth. According to positivism, for example, a statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proven true or false, at least in principle, by means of experience. A scientific theory is an axiomatic system that obtains an empirical interpretation through appropriate statements called rules of correspondence, which establish a correlation between real objects and the abstract concepts of the theory (Kolakowski 1972). Postmodernism is associated with the impossibility of knowing a singular truth; it rejects general laws and truths, including the idea of progress itself, in favor of local, unique, personal, and contextualized truths (e.g., Chaikilin 1992; Polkinghorne 1992). It also claims that there is indeterminacy, or a plurality of meaning, in events. As Elliott and Spezzano (1996) demonstrate, the theorists who come under the broad banner of postmodernism are a rather heterogeneous group. They vary considerably in the extent to which they leave room for relatively objective knowledge or universal truths. Similarly, not all psychoanalysts who adopt a relational tradition share the same epistemology. The relational tradition, though not synonymous with postmodernism, nonetheless tends to reflect postmodern ideologies. Aron (1996), an influential contributor to the relational tradition, notes that postmodernism has had a powerful impact on most relational analysts. Before elaborating any further, let me state that I am not interested in the philosophical debate between positivism and postmodernism, so much as in the sociology of building viable theories. My aim is to examine the harmful effects that postmodernism might have on the renewal and creativity of psychoanalysis, in the event that postmodernism becomes the leading force in this discipline. The crucial point is that theory building is impoverished when theoreticians do not strive for correspondence with reality, or for truth, however scientifically or philosophically thorny these issues may be.
IMAGES OF KNOWLEDGE

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I propose to distinguish between two eras in psychoanalysisthe positivist era of the schools and the postmodern eraby comparing their distinct images of knowledge. In doing so I will be using Elkanas theory of sociology of science (1981). According to Elkana, at any given moment there is a state of knowledge, with methods, solutions,
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open problems, nets of theories, and, at its core, scientific metaphysics. Some members of the scientific community share these views, while others have different views about the world, themselves, and society, with a different scientific metaphysical core. According to Elkana (1981), images of knowledge are socially determined views of knowledge (as opposed to views on nature or on society). They are beliefs held concerning the role of science (understanding, prediction), the nature of truth (certain, probable, attainable), and sources of knowledge (knowledge gained by way of ratiocination or by experimentation using the senses). These all serve to make up time-dependent, culture-dependent images of science. These images of knowledge determine what will be considered important, interesting, worthwhile, absurd, or risky. There are images of knowledge shared by the lay public, and there are images of knowledge shared only by professionals in a specific discipline. Some images of knowledge are maintained for centuries, some for decades, and some for only a few years. No field of knowledge formulates a list of its legitimate sources: this is the domain of the images of knowledge, which vary depending according to time, place, culture, and discipline. I argue that one of the main differences between era of the schools and contemporary psychoanalysis is that the images of knowledge have changed. In the former, which was influenced by a positivist epistemology, the quest for truth was perceived as an ideal, and empirical knowledge had a positive image. The creators of the schools believed that it is possible to find psychoanalytic truths that explain human phenomena. They also felt a strong sense of conf idence in the truth of their findings. This sense of certainty was the source of their commitment to building new theories of the mind. Images of knowledge have profoundly changed in postmodern psychoanalysis: truth is no longer perceived as an ideal toward which to strive. Postmodern psychoanalysis replaces the ideal of the analyst who knows with an analyst who acknowledges uncertainty and embraces the impossibility of recognizing only one truth, or the inability to generate objective truths independent of historical context and culture (Hoffman 1987). There are numerous examples illustrating the deconstruction of truth in the relational tradition (Aron 1996; Hoffman 1987, 1998; Mitchell 1988, 1993;). A good example can be found in the works of Spezzano (1999), a relational analyst who is influenced by Richard
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Rortys postmodern philosophy: Whether we search for the truth about philosophy in Grunbaum or in hermeneutics or whether a scholar from outside our field comes looking to us for truth, the end never comes, and no knowledge turns out to be the final truth. That is what is appealing about Rortys way of talking about philosophy and all other disciplines as languages and about languages as tools. When you talk about truth, you ask who is right and who is wrong. When you talk about tools, the discussion gets reframed, and you ask how the tool works and what you can and cannot do with it (p. 442). Spezzano goes on to claim that the relational model redefines truth as a relational consensus, achieved by a dialogical community through active critical argument. For Spezzano, it is time to give up certainty about truth (p. 450). I am not claiming that the relational definition of truth is philosophically wrong; rather, I am highlighting a psychological problem as it relates to the mind of the creative analyst. One cannot create a new theory of mind, a new school of thought, and at the same time contend that one cannot be certain about anything. Whereas Spezzano (1999) holds that by giving up certainty we accept endlessness as the most certain thing about our discussion (p. 450), I argue that the sense of eternity and certainty is an important trait of the creative person. Hence, of the two philosophies, only positivism embraces an image of knowledge that enables the creation of new theories (for a third alternative that combines these stances, see Ricoeur 1977). We can use Rortys own words to demonstrate this point. Rorty (1989) believes that language, which makes it possible to formulate new descriptions of the world, is the most valuable realization of our culture: human life is triumphant just insofar as it escapes from inherited descriptions of the contingencies of its existence and finds new descriptions (p. 29). For Rorty, the strong maker, the person who uses words as they have never before been used, is best able to appreciate her own contingency. For she can see, more clearly than the continuityseeking historian, critic, or philosopher, that her language is as contingent as her parents or her historical epoch. She can appreciate the force of the claim that truth is a mobile army of metaphors because, by her own sheer strength, she has broken out of one perspective, one metaphoric, into another (p. 28). Praising Freuds pragmatism, Rorty tells us something that is relevant to all schools of psychoanalytic thought: Freud just wants to give
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us one more redescription of things to be filed alongside all the others, one more vocabulary, one more set of metaphors which he thinks have a chance of being used and thereby literalized (p. 28). Rorty believes that words-describing-the-world-in-new-ways (rather than language as a medium to reality) are the most practical and useful projects, facilitating the realization and influence of new and distinctive ideas and theories. But Rorty is idealizing or misrepresenting Freud (or anyone else) who uses words as they have never been used before, by attributing to him a perspectival view. Although Freud was sensitive to the problematic issue of psychoanalytic knowledge, he did not think of his own theory as a metaphor. Even as late as 1937, he believed that the analysts work resembles to a great extent an archaeologists excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed or buried and that the two processes are in fact identical (p. 259). Freud is obviously seeking an historical truth, not a narrative one. And in The Question of a Weltanschauung, Freud (1933) leaves no doubt as to which path psychoanalysis should follow: The endeavor of scientific thinking is to arrive at correspondence with realitythat is to say, with what exists outside us and independently of us. . . . This correspondence with the real external world we call truth (p. 170). In this lecture he also repudiated the anarchist theory which, according to him, argues that since the criterion of truthcorrespondence with the external world is absent, it is entirely a matter of indifference what opinions we adopt. All of them are equally true and equally false. And no one has a right to accuse anyone else of error (p. 176). Freud criticized such a view on the ground that it breaks down with its first step into practical life (p. 176). Freuds fascination with the correspondence theory of truth is probably found in all word-makers in human culture. Inevitably, the ironist who Rorty claims does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself (p. 73), is also incapable of creating a new vocabulary to describe the world. By contrast the metaphysician, who believes that a single, permanent reality can be found behind many temporary appearances (p. 73), can be very creative. It is the tendency to choose a definitive vocabulary that enables the metaphysician to create one. These are not just two philosophical stances, but two psychological states of mind. Indeed, since the recent transformation in our images of knowledge, it seems that such productivity and creativity are no longer
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possible. In the last twenty years, changes in Western culture and in psychoanalysis itself have given rise to analysts who are less willing to know the truth or to seek it out. As a result, psychoanalysis has not generated a new school of thought since Kohut, the last analyst to have done so. It has therefore not provided any new and interesting descriptions of the human mind. Even the contemporary relational perspective, which has been strongly inf luenced by the new paradigm, is not quite a distinctive new school of thought; rather, it is an eclectic theory with many different perspectives sharing the premise that attachment and relationships are the core of human experience (Aron 1996). In a way, especially in terms of psychoanalytic vocabulary, our era appears to be the most impoverished period in the history of psychoanalysis. The era in which the richest and most complex psychoanalytic theories of mind were created has passed. One may simply consider how little the psychoanalytic encyclopedia has developed over the past twenty years. It is quite clear that in this postmodern period only a handful of new concepts have enriched our vocabulary. In comparison to works like A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (Hinshelwood 1989) and The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967), a Dictionary of Postmodern Thought in Psychoanalysis would be a thin volume indeed. Because the adherents of the schools are still thinking in a positivist way (they cannot do otherwise), most of the innovative developments of new concepts have taken place within the framework of existing languages and schools. The excitement of the earlier days produced many new concepts, and the current situation comes nowhere near it. Yet the downside of the old positivist era was its lack of insight into the dogmatism of the schools or into the institutional structures that discouraged or even prevented the testing of hypotheses. So while the schools generated rich and compelling theories, almost no effort was made to test these concepts empirically to determine if they correspond to reality.
POSTMODERNISM AND NEW THEORIES

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The limited ability of postmodernists to build new theories is not a logical necessity, but a psychological situation, conditioned by the uncertain image of knowledge. It is not postmodernism as a philosophy, but its image of knowledge, that makes it difficult to create new theories.
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If our theories are merely limited in terms of their truth-value, are influenced by cultural factors, or have a metaphorical quality, the situation would not be incompatible with the notion that they are true or valid in some qualified sense of the term. Further, even for postmodern analysts theories, though not regarded as incontrovertibly true, retain their functional utility and serve to guide clinical work. In short, there are ostensibly no obstacles to building new theories, even in postmodernism. It is only in radical postmodernism, endorsing a purely relativist approach, that theory building is in danger. It is to the credit of the postmodern thinkers in relational psychoanalysis, however, that they have insisted on rejecting radical postmodernism as an appropriate epistemology for psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Hoffman, 1998, p. xxiii). In a manner often seen in dialectical development, the relational tradition has in fact had a positive impact on certain aspects of psychoanalysis. In a thorough critique of institutionalized psychoanalysis in North America, Kirsner (2000) noted how mainstream psychoanalysis was often unwilling to accept new ideas and operated much as religious groups sometimes do: with a rigid authoritarian attitude and emotionally driven claims of ultimate truth. According to Kirsner, most psychoanalytic disputes involve mythological standards based more on passed down versions of the truth than on the examination of evidence ( p. 237). Kernberg (1986) too argued that psychoanalytic education is suffering serious turbulence, which by analogy may be viewed as an illness affecting the educational structures of psychoanalytic institutes and societies in America. Elsewhere Kernberg (1996) has described thirty methods by which psychoanalytic institutes destroy the creativity of candidates. The relational movement played an important role in altering this trend. One can sympathize with the pluralist, eclectic, open-minded, anti-authoritarian approach of relational analysts, which has nurtured a positive and radical shift in psychoanalysis. Analysts with a postmodern orientation have helped psychoanalysis adapt itself to the twentyfirst century, being the bearers and implementers of nonpositivistic philosophies in theory and technique. Further, as Bass (2000) has noted, the relational perspective synthesizes and integrates diverse clinical and theoretical contributions in ways that make them accessible and useful to working analysts of many schools. While the relational tradition has made extraordinarily positive contributions to psychoanalysis, and its postmodern epistemology is
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indeed moderate, as a political movement the American relational tradition has had unwanted psychological and sociological effects on psychoanalysis. One such effect has been a severe decline in the positive image of knowledge that is so crucial for the building of new theories. Led by the relational movement, but influenced by a much broader movement in Western philosophy and culture, this trend has greatly altered international psychoanalysis. It has led not only to disparagement of the school era, but also to the devaluation of any attempt to know the truth. From this inherent tension the question arises, How can psychoanalysis continue to be pluralistic and still change, grow, and reinvent itself ? How can we salvage the achievements of the relational movement without sacrificing the sense of knowing the truth that is needed to formulate new theories of the mind?
THE IMPORTANCE OF SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

One of the most important achievements of the schools was their ability to build thick descriptions. This concept, which is related to ethnography, was introduced by Ryle (1971) and used by Elkana (1981) to evaluate the history and philosophy of science. For Ryle, thick description is a way of describing the complexity of thinking: he starts from the most elementary, single-layer activity, such as counting the number of cars on the street. Describing this activity involves a very thin description. Then, layer by layer, the activity becomes more complex and its description thicker. Consequently, the description given when recounting the activities of a person lies somewhere on a continuum between the very thin and the very thick, and the thickness depends on the activity we are describing. The brilliance of psychoanalytic schools is that they offer thick descriptions of the human psyche. The phenomena described are explained by theoreticians as pieces of a greater theory of the human mind, rather than as isolated and local. The thickness of each psychoanalytic theory stems from the fact that in each of them, different explanations are embedded in a unified theory that is coherent with multiple implications for all domains of human life: from development to psychopathology, from mothering to therapeutic relations, from sexual behavior to depression. Each school presents a psychoanalytic grand theory, a general theory of the human psyche that
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includes premises on stages of development, therapeutic goals, the transference relationship, psychopathology, and healthy personality. In fact, these theories touch on every aspect of human conduct. For Winnicott, for example, the reason children play with teddy bears is to a large extent related to good enough mothering, a true self, therapeutic relations, psychopathology, and so on. In just over a hundred years, psychoanalysis has managed to produce a rich mosaic of terms, concepts, and theories that covers a wide range of human behaviors and clinical phenomena. Psychoanalysis has been inf luential in the development of a new language, and has resulted in our attaining a new perspective for understanding our world. Its major achievement, and most remarkable creation, is a complex net of theories and concepts used to describe the human mind. Psychoanalysis, like every body of knowledge, is indeed a language, one that comprises different dialects (the theories of the schools). Every new psychoanalytic theory describes new phenomena or redescribes known phenomena in new ways. Since Freud, psychoanalysis has managed to produce hundreds of concepts and terms. Some of these have become so popular in our culture and in everyday speech that we cannot imagine our lives without them. Concepts such as the unconscious, the oedipus complex, narcissism, holding, projection, the id, and the superego have become common parlance through novels, plays, poems, and movies, and have become embedded in Western culture. But psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists are familiar with still other concepts, such as projective identification, countertransference, and selfobject or mutative interpretation. These concepts influence how therapists think about their patients and understand them. Psychoanalytic terms have become our categories of thought. Without them we cannot come to grips with our patients, or understand human conduct. Our wide-ranging psychoanalytic vocabulary comprises subvocabularies stemming from the different schools. There is a Freudian vocabulary, a Kleinian vocabulary, a Winnicottian vocabulary, and so on. The core of psychoanalytic knowledge is made up of these concepts and languages, and the importance of this knowledge should be recognized by anyone committed to psychoanalysis, regardless of epistemological premises. Positivists and postmodernists alike need the schools for their thinking. Why a positivist needs them is more obvious. For the positivist, the psychoanalytic school is a body of theory to be tested to see if claims
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of truth can be assigned to it, and to determine whether it corresponds to reality. The knowledge derived from the theory can be tested, verified, or perhaps found wanting and replaced. But without the schools, there are no theories to be tested. Psychoanalytic schools explain a great variety of things in a concise manner. They minimize the number of apparently independent phenomena by reusing the same arguments to explain changes of many different sorts. In other words, the schools represent explanatory unification, a virtue to be pursued in scientific theorizing (Maki 2001). The postmodernist view is more interesting. The postmodernist will postulate that while the old schools may have erred in thinking that their theories correspond to reality, nevertheless each has added to psychoanalytic discourse one more redescription of the human mind, one more vocabulary, one more set of metaphors.
TWO NECESSARY CONDITIONS FOR THE CREATION OF A SCHOOL

Why and how were the schools so productive, creative, and fertile? How did each of them manage to add so many new terms, theories, and concepts to the psychoanalytic dictionary? I can think of two necessary conditions for the creation of a school: the desire to solve new empirical problems, and a relative indifference to philosophical questions.
Solving New Empirical Problems

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A psychoanalytic school of thought evolves out of a desire to create a broad theory that captures reality. The success of each school in psychoanalysis stems from the fact that each provides satisfactory solutions to important problems. The philosopher of science Larry Laudan (1977) argues that science fundamentally aims toward arriving at solutions to problems. Theories should therefore be evaluated on whether they provide adequate solutions to significant empirical problems. It is less relevant to ask whether theories are true, corroborated, or well-confirmed. An empirical problem, Laudan argues, is anything about the natural world which strikes us as odd, or otherwise in need of explanation (p. 15). Examples of empirical problems in psychoanalysis include questions like: Why do babies attach themselves to a particular object, such as a teddy bear, at a particular age? Why are some people so envious? Why are some people afraid of enclosed places?
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One of the fascinating things about the schools is that many of the phenomena they describe had not been recognized as empirical problems requiring an explanation prior to these descriptions. Slips of the tongue were a well-known phenomenon before Freud noted them, but were not considered a scientific or empirical problem. The fact of their existence became an empirical problem only when Freud decided it was sufficiently interesting and important to deserve explanation. Another example is Winnicotts theory of the transitional object. The fact that a toddler clings to a teddy bear was well known long before Winnicott gave it an explanation. Here again is a new phenomenon, which no one before Winnicott had seriously thought to describe in psychoanalytic or any other terms. Such phenomena are real and concrete behaviors that occur in our world, but were unexplained before a theoretician decided to describe them in psychoanalytic terms. Each psychoanalytic theory had its own domain of phenomena, or empirical problems, that it proposed to explain: Kohut noticed that patients react more positively to empathic understanding then to interpretations based on a drive model; Klein wanted to understand the destructive side of her child patients and their sadistic mode of playing. Each of these theoreticians was interested in real and concrete phenomena that had been overlooked. New terms, concepts, and theories were required in order to translate these phenomena into psychoanalytic language. There are more than a dozen Winnicottian concepts related to a childs playing with a teddy bear; Kleinian vocabulary contains dozens of concepts that describe human destructiveness; Kohut developed a rich system of thought in order to explain why empathy has such an enormous effect on patients and children; and so on.
A Relative Indifference to Philosophical Questions

Unlike the contemporary postmodern analysts, the theory builders Winnicott, Klein, Fairbairn, Kohut, Kernberg, and most others (Bion being an exception)were more drawn to describing phenomena that happen in the concrete reality of human life than to philosophical issues. Even when a theory builder expressed interest in epistemological questions (e.g., Kohut 1984), these questions remained marginal to the desire to understand clinical phenomena in psychoanalytic terms. This relative indifference to questions about truth and knowledge may have narrowed their points of view. But it also allowed their free-f lowing curiosity to be directed toward things
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that happen in human life, such as envy, empathy, childs play, ambivalence, hatred, and love. The founders of the psychoanalytic school shared a moderate epistemological view, which likely is probably a necessary condition for the creation of a new psychoanalytic theory. It was precisely their belief in realism and the correspondence theory of truthbut not in gathering statistical datathat enabled Freud, Klein, Winniccott, Kohut, and others to provide a universal map of the underlying structure of the mind. They were, fortunately or not, probably unaware of their stance and did not seriously consider all of its philosophical implications either because they were relatively uninterested, or because they were not exposed to questions about knowledge. Perhapsand there is no way we can know thisif Klein or Mahler, to name just two examples, had been exposed to the ongoing contemporary debate about the nature of knowledge, they would have come to the conclusion that to claim to know things about the world is a difficult and complex matter. In consequence, they might not have wanted to claim with such meticulousness and determination that they know, for example, what goes on between mothers and infants, or inside an infants mind.
CAN POSTMODERN ANALYSTS SOLVE NEW EMPIRICAL PROBLEMS?

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At first glance it seems that empirical problems are not the main target of postmodern analysts, for they are more interested in metatheory than in theory itself. Their primary motivation is not in explaining facts, empirical problems, or things that happen in the world. Mitchell (1993) states this very clearly: The shift in thinking has taken place not on the level of theory but on the level of metatheory: theory about theory. It does not concern questions about what motivates the analyst and the structure of mind, the development of emotional life. Rather, it concerns the question of what the analyst can know about any of these things (p. 42). But it is important to remember that most postmodern writers have a keen interest in facts and empirical problems. It is not exactly that there are two distinct groups, postmodernists interested in philosophy and positivists interested in facts. It seems to me that the tension between certainty and uncertainty exists not only between the two groups,
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but also within each analyst. See, for example, Ghent (1990), who explores what people wish and what they need, and Davies and Frawley (1991), whose work is with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. There are many other examples. In fact, I believe that it is difficult to draw a sharp line between facts and philosophy. In Sterns unformulated experience (1983), to cite one example, is something a fact, or is it an articulation of a philosophical constructivist idea? Despite this, there are two primary differences between postmodern formulations and those of the psychoanalytic schools. The first difference is novelty. Postmodernists, especially the American relational group, retrieve what they see as valuable in existing theories, extricate it from its positivist moorings, and reposition it in an intersubjective and constructivist model. They do this more often than they try to generate new theoretical formulations of analytic process, or structures of mental life and development. Consider, for example, classic relational books such as Arons A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis (1996), or Mitchells Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis (1997). These books offer a sophisticated new framework that uses intersubjective and relational ideas as an organizing concept for existing psychoanalytic theories and concepts. The authors do not aim to generate novel ways of describing clinical phenomena, or even new techniques. The other important difference is this: even when these analysts are trying to solve new empirical problems, they employ thin descriptions rather then thick ones. Their truths, as they themselves admit, are local, contextualized, and culturally dependent. They cannot be placed in a grand theory of mind that has implications for all of human conduct. Irwin Hoffman, for example, one of the most prolific writers of the relational group, has enriched us with a new theory of transference based on what he calls dialectical constructivism. But his insights are not based on a new developmental theory, and are not directly connected to mother-infant interactions. He bases his transference theory on existential philosophy rather than on development. For Hoffman, as for other relational analysts, philosophy has become a major source of knowledge, overriding the importance of development. Perhaps Benjamins theory (1988) is the only one that comes close to a thick description, as she has managed to produce a developmental theory that has therapeutic implications and that could, with further expansion, become a new psychoanalytic school.
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DISMISSING THE CAUSAL RELATIONS BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT

The most striking example of the harmful effects that postmodernism might have on the renewal and creativity of psychoanalysis is the attempt to devalue the role of development in therapy. The controversy about establishing causal relations between past and present is part of a larger debate about the validity and usefulness of etiological hypotheses. In the era of the schools, finding causal relations between past and present was a cornerstone of psychoanalytic thought and one of the main characteristics of its image of knowledge. Postmodern critique is not about developmental theories as such; rather, it arrays itself against the traditional tendency of theory-oriented analysts to favor infancy and early childhood in their consideration of transference issues. This criticism is directed precisely at the major premise underlying the creativity of the schools period: the causal relation between transference issues and childhood events. In a period when developmental theory is considered a metaphor or a narrative, and when analysts are cautioned not to relate to the theory too seriously, the motivation to develop a new theory of development is diminished. By examining three different views that oppose the causal relation between development and transference, I intend to show how they contribute to a postmodern antitheoretical atmosphere in psychoanalysis. The problem is not that these criticisms are wrong or unjustified; rather, it is that with no room in psychoanalysis for those who know the truth (i.e., no room for the epistemological stance necessary to create a new school), the capacity of psychoanalysis for renewal and creativity is at risk.
Spences Views

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The first instance is Donald Spences Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (1982). A prolific writer and a representative of the hermeneutic tradition in therapy, Spence was one of the first writers in mainstream psychoanalysis in the 1980s to cast doubt on the validity of the positivist epistemology to which psychoanalysis still clung. I consider the views of Spence to be a moderate objection to developmental theories, given of his complex approach to such theories in general. In his writings, Spence managed to retain the tension between positivism and postmodernism without reaching a conclusive position
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concerning them one way or another. He questioned the tendency of analysts to celebrate the establishing of historical truth after a successful interpretation; their achievement, he thought, stems from their finding a coherent narrative, and not from an actual event. He demonstrated convincingly that appealing narratives can confuse analysts, who then tend to misinterpret them as historical truth: Narrative truth has a special significance in its own right and making contact with the actual past may be far less significant than creating a coherent and consistent account of a particular set of events (pp. 2728). He claimed that interpretations are persuasive not because of their evidential value but because of their rhetorical appeal; conviction emerges because the fit is good, not because we have necessarily made contact with the past (p. 32). Spence is no radical postmodernist: the path to historical truth is blocked not because he doubts the existence of an objective external reality, or because he thinks developmental theories are just useful narratives and have no bearing on concrete reality. What he finds troubling, rather, is the distorting nature of language. Memories and past experiences are by nature visual, formless, and nonverbal. When they are translated from the private language to the common language of speech, they are inevitably filtered and distorted, distancing the verbal articulation from the real experience. If the interpretation is not necessarily related to the actual past, what should be used to guide the analysts interventions? What would be considered a good interpretation? One of Spences criteria for an adequate interpretation is aesthetic. He thinks that aesthetic appeal should replace historical accuracy. The implications of this position for developmental theories are evident: even if we do believe in the validity of such a theory (i.e., believe this is really how things transpire for babies), we can no longer believe in the chance of finding a particular patients actual route of development. The role Spence attributes to developmental theories is therefore minimized: the theory may serve as a good metaphor, but we cannot expect to reconstruct actual events according to the theory. At most we can use the theory as material for composing rich and highly convincing narratives. My aim here is not to argue against the epistemological basis of Spences notions, but rather to show the pragmatic implications of his view, especially his hermeneutic take on psychoanalysis. The first objection to Spence is that there is a conspicuous gap between his ideas and how most analysts (even postmodern ones) think
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and operate in their day-to-day work. It seems highly unlikely that analysts think of themselves merely as good storytellers, or that they will strive to become brilliant authors whose main goal is to tailor narratives according to their patients reports. Should analysts, along with their regular psychoanalytic training, take courses in prose, rhetoric, and speech? Should they prefer style to substance? Can they really give up the untenable search for historical reality? A second objection concerns the contract analysts have with their patients. Spences theorizing is a good example of the inherent contradictions between how we talk with patients, and how we explain the cultural context in which we find ourselves. It reflects how difficult it is to fuse postmodern theory and therapeutics (Stein 1995). Surely it is unthinkable to tell a patient: You should know that it will be almost impossible to know anything about your actual past; we can only try to make a good story out of it. But dont worrya narrative truth is just as good as an historical one. This objection is of course parallel to my main argument, which is not only that analysts who know are required if we are to generate new schools of thought, but also that they are needed for the simple act of helping people. Patients in distress are more likely to expect their analysts to know something than to be uncertain and intersubjective (for a discussion, see Freud 1927, p. 268; for a dialectical-constructivist view, see Hoffman 1998, pp. 175178). The third objection has to do with the main damage done to the renewal of psychoanalysis entailed in Spences hermeneutic view. If the psychoanalytic interpretation is only narrative, only a story, why should theoreticians bother even to contemplate developing new grand theories based on clinical data from adult patients? If a general line of development cannot be deduced from patients stories, what chance does psychoanalysis have of renewing itself? We will recall that the causal relation between adult experience and childhood events is a necessary condition for creating a grand theory. Perhaps the answers to some of these questions are to be found in Spences other writings. Spence is no simple hermeneutician; he has an empiricist side as well. Unlike some contemporary relational analysts, Spence does not dismiss the relevance of the developmental metaphor in therapy. On the contrary, he is a great admirer of empirically wellbased development theories. He thinks that the parent-child analogy can be used as a basic metaphor for the psychoanalytic therapeutic processas long as it is based on careful research (Mayes and Spence
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1994). Spence believes that validated clinical data gathered in recent years from developmental processes justifies the use of developmental metaphors in the clinical setting. He claims that in order to be a true science, psychoanalysis must develop a public database and a tradition of empirical investigation. Sass and Woolfolk (1988) suggest, contrary to the general assumption, that Spence did not try to ground psychoanalysis in hermeneutics. Rather to the contrary, he is a closet empiricist who suggested that psychoanalysis ground itself in extraclinical, natural-science observation. I believe that this is only one side of the story, and that Spence wears two hats. He wears an empiricist hat when he admires empirically based developmental theories, and when he condemns theories that are based on powerful rhetoric but not on scientific evidence. He wears a hermeneutic hat when he doubts that analysts can know the actual past, and when he states that once a given construction has acquired narrative truth, it becomes just as real as any other kind of truth (1982, p. 31). While he adopts the hermeneutic tradition in therapy and likens the therapist to an artist or a good storyteller, he does not think the same about developmental theories. In this case, the rhetorical appeal, the beauty of the theory and its aesthetic value, is a disadvantage. It is a myth that should be discredited because of its lack of scientific evidence. I agree with Spences stress on the importance of continued investigation of actual psychoanalytic processes through more detailed and exacting research. This investigation may give rise to uncertainty concerning our strongly held beliefs, but may also give rise to more clinical certainty. To revive a new developmental theory of mind, therapists must support research that emphasizes the importance of early environmental influences on the development of personality.
A Relational Perspective: There Is More than Just the Past

Another objection against the use of developmental theories in therapy comes from the relational perspective. Stephen Mitchell (1988) and Nancy Chodorow (1999) both argue against the extreme use of developmental theory in therapy. Both stress the importance of the here-and-now interaction between therapist and patient, not as a direct and simplistic one-to-one connection of past experiences, but as a lively, ongoing intersubjective interaction in its own right. Spence doubts the
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possibility of ever really knowing about past events from the analytic interaction, yet he never denies the tremendous impact of the past on every therapeutic exchange. Mitchell and Chodorow, on the other hand, think that the past should not be taken so seriously. Mitchells condemnation of relying heavily on the past (1988) is, of course, part of his postmodern philosophical agenda: The use of the baby as a metaphor has been so characteristic of psychoanalytic thought from its inception that we tend to assume that explaining adult phenomena in terms of infantile prototypes is actually providing causal accounts, facts, rather than highlighting experiential similarities, which themselves call for further inquiry (p. 169). He argues that his discussion concerning the metaphor of the baby behooves us not to take our theories about babies too seriously (p. 133). One of the problems with the postmodern suggestion that the past be taken lightly is that postmodernists never provide an alternative. This is understandable, as postmodern writers dont want to add another theory, description, or technique as an alternative to traditional theories. They prefer to propose a new sensibility or metatheory. Sometimes postmodernists rephrase existing concepts, but afterward one is left with ambiguous feelings, unsure of how to assimilate their writings in clinical work. Consider Mitchells following statement (1988): The earliest experiences are meaningful not because they lay down structural residues which remain f ixed, but because they are the earliest representation of patterns of family structure and interactions which will be repeated over and over in different forms at different developmental stages. Understanding the past is crucial, not because the past lies concealed within or beneath the present, but because understanding the past provides clues to deciphering how and why the present is being approached and shaped the way it is (p. 149). Mitchell calls this attitude toward the past the interactional option (p. 149), but from reading him closely it is hard to determine if there really are such meaningful differences between his option and the developmental-arrest model. In fairness to Mitchell it should be noted that he did take the schools of thought very seriously, and in fact devoted almost all his psychoanalytic writings to promoting a dialogue among different traditions, and to adopting a respectful yet playful approach to psychoanalytic theories (Mitchell 1991, 1993, 1997). But Mitchells justified
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criticism of the traditional analysts authoritative approach has unintentionally undermined the necessary conditions for generating a new theory or description of the human mind. The same question, what should the analyst rely on principally if not the past, is also relevant to another postmodern relational analyst: Nancy Chodorow. Chodorow (1999) argues that heavy reliance on the past in the psychoanalytic encounter obscures a much more significant aim, which is the creation of personal subjective meaning in relation to self and others, and the importance of the subjective here and now: We should be wary of clinical explanations positing objectivized universal childhood stages or psychobiological drives that determine or predict later psychological experience and universalist claims about the panhuman content of unconscious fantasies. . . . We can observe, be surprised by, and help ourselves and our patients to create these new meanings more easily if our listening is not filtered and shaped by assumptions that an Oedipus complex, castration fears, fantasies about the primal scene, or envy of the breast or the mothers inside are universally given . . . (pp. 6364). Chodorow argues that psychoanalytic theories of mind should not be restricted to the question of how childhood events dictate transference, but should be seen as more holistic theories that cover the entire life cycle and its myriad modes of interaction. As with Mitchell, as useful as it may be to consider these aspects of developmental theories, it is hard for me at least to formulate their practical meaning. What, for instance, does Chodorow mean by particular subjective childhood and unique evidence of individual transferences ? (p. 64) How can we translate these notions to our work with patients? Further, and even more important, from reading Chodorows clinical material it is hard to tell the difference between her methods and those of the analysts she criticizes for conceptualizing the transference as a developmental process. Consider, for example, her analysis of a female patient, B. (pp. 8184). B. usually arrives late to sessions. Perhaps unconscious of her motives, she deliberately arranges her sessions to take place just after her work with her male employer. B. feels it hard to pull herself away from the exciting employer to the meeting with her analyst, and relates to the therapy as an obligation. During sessions, writes Chodorow, She is preoccupied with concerns about her employer. By contrast she pays little notice to me. I feel likeand she conf irms that I amtaken-for-granted background,
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a maternal nag who can be kept waiting, who wants only to talk about boring, petty issues like lateness, schedules, and phone numbers (p. 82). Chodorows deep understanding of the transference, unlike her opinions I have quoted, relies heavily on the past and on object relations developmental theories. The employer is a powerful man, a perfect, ideal man who will rescue her and make her feel wonderful, rather than rejecting her as she feels her father did (p. 82). Chodorow herself is the mother who was weak, unable to care for herself or for her children, unable to find a good love relationship, unable to keep a nice house (p. 82). The experience of the therapy as an obligation that is pulling her apart from her employer is the reminiscence of a past experience: she found the weekly good-byes to her father, who was divorced from her mother, painful and difficult (p. 82). Here we can see that if one wants to be called psychoanalytic, it is very hard to avoid the causality that exists between childhood and transference. The gap between Chodorows metatheory and her case studies is a good example of the contradictions between contemporary cultural criticism and psychoanalysis proper. Despite an authors wishes, metatheory does not always have clinical implications. Chodorow is not the only example. When we compare case studies by postmodern writers with those by analysts oriented to a school, the differences are not always so clear.
CONCLUSION: AFTER MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

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To sum up, the continued generation of psychoanalytic schools is necessary for the following reasons: (1) new schools generate new theories that can be tested and verified; (2) they enrich psychoanalytic knowledge with new metaphors, vocabularies, and descriptions; (3) they generate thick descriptions; (4) they identify and solve clinical problems, many never before acknowledged as problems; (5) they represent a healthy crisis in psychoanalysis that leads to a change of paradigm (Kuhn 1962); (6) adherents to a new school engage in creative activity and generate training programs, journals, books, and conferences, which keeps psychoanalysis lively; (7) the new schools mirror cultural changes unrecognized by the old schools, thus transforming psychoanalysis into an updated and relevant body of knowledge.
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The creators of a school of thought cannot be postmodernists. They cannot think of their theory simply as a narrative or a metaphor. The creator of a school can generate a grand theory only if he or she implicitly acknowledges the existence of an independent ontological reality, a real thing in itself that can be known. If analysts forcefully and habitually remind one another that it is impossible to know the truth, they will feel performance anxiety whenever they think of something new, interesting, and positive to say about the world. The substitution of the analyst who imagines with the analyst who knows (Spezzano 1997) may erode the potential of psychoanalysis to generate new theories that know new things about the human mind. Not knowing, to paraphrase Hoffman (1998), is not always a good thing. Winnicott (1971) perceived science under the rubric of transitional phenomena. What he writes about the baby and the transitional object rings true for the creative analyst: Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without? The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated (p. 96). The philosopher Mary Douglas (1978) conceived a similar idea: Delusion is necessary. . . . A good part of the human predicament is always to be unaware of the minds own generative powers and to be limited by concepts of the minds own fashioning (p. 14). Postmodernists need positivists if they want psychoanalysis to generate new theories. Using postmodernism alone risks the impoverishment of psychoanalysis, yet postmodernism still has a vital role to play in the discipline. While it does not aim to generate a new theory of the mind, it provides a metatheory that examines what the analyst can know about facts and theories of mind. Postmodernism should be viewed as a watchdog that warns against the dictatorship of any theory claiming to fit reality and to be true, rather than being the vanguard of psychoanalysis. This will enable psychoanalysis to create, imagine, and renew itself without becoming a fixed doctrine. But can that happen? Can we seriously believe that analysts can return to an innocent phase, to the naive realism that enabled their predecessors to create rich narratives of the mind that they considered incontrovertibly true? May we expect that in the future the educated analyst will put uncertainty about knowledge aside and ignore contemDownloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Univ of Education, Winneba on December 11, 2013

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porary philosophy? That the analyst will explain things that happen in the world, such as developmental stages, parenting, and psychopathology, with the same conviction and self-assurance that characterized the theory builders of the modern era? I think it would be a mistake to believe this could happen. Reading a classical psychoanalytic text today is very different from the way analysts read that same text in the past. I miss my student days, during which a new psychoanalytic theory was introduced every semester in psychoanalytic courses, before we were exposed to critical questions about knowledge. We took it for granted that every healthy baby has a transitional object, wants to tear up its mothers breast, or goes through a symbiotic phase. Every lesson broadened our horizons and opened our eyes to new meanings and new ways of understanding our first patients. We were amazed to see how these concepts corresponded to reality, and we did not think of them as metaphors. We were excited because we felt we were touching upon an astounding truth about people that was about to transform our perception, not only about babies and patients but about ourselves as well. Indeed, after reading Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Fairbairn, and Kohut, we were not the same. But after reading philosophers such as Rorty, Derrida, and Lyotard, and analysts such as Hoffman, Mitchell, Aron, and Stolorow, to name just a few, our readings (and we) have been transformed once again. How painful this disillusionment has been! It is as though a whole generation of analysts educated on psychoanalytic truths woke up one morning to find out that the world was not what they thought. Even if this generation of psychoanalysts f inds a new epistemological theory, more moderate in its assumptions, that will enable us to produce knowledge (see Cavell 1999), things will never be the same again. Our metatheory has changed. We can never read a psychoanalytic text again with the same enthusiasm of touching the real truth that characterized our first reading. So, if we cant go back to a naive phase, and to stay in the postmodern phase might harm the creativity of our field, perhaps the best thing analysts can do is to move on to a third phase. The most important thing that needs to happen in order for a third phase to begin is for the psychoanalytic community to recognize the contradiction between its own interest in creating new theories of mind and the insights of postmodernism regarding knowledge. I believe that this recognition can emerge only when analysts realize that their body
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of knowledge is currently in a vacuum: that analysts have sharpened their sensitivity to questions about knowledge, with the cost being dwindling new theories of the mind. Only a longing for revitalization can lead analysts to a third, creative phase. When this longing is felt, there will be a strong movement toward a new theory of knowledge that will be sensitive to postmodernist claims about knowledge, but also enable the creation of new theories and new knowledge. It is important to note that there is no need to resolve the problem on a philosophical level. As Hanly (1995) aptly states, Since these epistemologies are no less controversial in philosophy than they are in psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts cannot rely on philosophy for a resolution of the controversy (p. 901). Moreover, there is a wealth of literature within psychoanalysis that from a philosophical point of view enables analysts to know, while simultaneously being sensitive to postmodern insights. Theory is not only what we know; it is also what we dont know and yet (or so) theorize about. It may be that theories address the uncertainty issues raised by postmodernists, as the facts or truths studied by the positivists do not. Indeed, many analysts are striving for correspondence with reality while remaining aware of the epistemological problems that need to be considered (Ahumada 1994; Cavell 1999; Eagle 2000; Hanly 1990; Laplanche 1992). In order for psychoanalysis to evolve and produce new knowledge, however, it would not suffice to discover a sophisticated philosophy suitable for producing new concepts and languages. A new climate, a new state of mind, is required for such developments to thrive. One thing is clear: progress, or a healthy state of knowledge, is possible only if the image of newly achieved knowledge is a positive one; otherwise decline is almost inevitable (Elkana 1981). Individual analysts cannot undertake this third phase by themselves, because they work in a powerful zeitgeist that must be transformed before new theories can be generated. Our institutions and organizations bear the responsibility for changing this zeitgeist. Psychoanalytic institutions need to revise their political agenda and address analysts who want to generate thick descriptions and solve new empirical problems. They need to do this in a pluralist manner, so there will be no turning back to indoctrination and suppression of new ideas. One alternative is to follow in the footsteps of Freudental (1996), who, in addressing similar problems in philosophy of science,
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described three types of political imperative in scientific establishments: institutionalized dogmatism, internalized pluralism, and institutionalized pluralism. These three types of political imperative might be seen as parallel to three phases in psychoanalysis: the era of psychoanalytic schools, postmodern psychoanalysis, and the third phase I now propose. My objective is not to present ideal solutions to problems, but to provide a theoretical framework that might facilitate such solutions. According to Freudental (1996), in institutionalized dogmatism statements of the relevant conceptual scheme are valid not only within the dogma and according to its standards, but are also used to adjudicate the truth claims of competing theories: Being at the same time both party and judge, it is no wonder that ones own party winsnot because of a psychological inclination of the judge but because the logical standards of judgment belong to this very theory or conceptual scheme. Second, if this universal truth claim merges with political power, it can be turned into a comprehensive political reality i.e., the internal consistency of a theory is translated into an institutional reality, excluding all but one view (p. 153). Doesnt this lively description echo the classical psychoanalytic institution? Internalized pluralism consists of taking the experience of the plurality of contemporary and historical conceptual schemes as the Archimedean point, and demanding of the scholar or scientist not to believe in or advocate any particular one. The scholar should so to say internalize the existing historical and societal pluralism. It is because our societies are inclined toward this latter conception that we are less aware of its repressive consequences (p. 153). As I have demonstrated, by emphasizing the fact that experience is open to multiple interpretations that cannot be verified, postmodern psychoanalysis demands a moderate internalized pluralism. There is a third alternative, however, which I believe can be modified and tuned to address the specific problems of psychoanalysis. In institutionalized pluralism, pluralism is demanded not of individuals but of institutions. Institutions should secure the pluralism of monolithic points of view. In practice, relevant but incompatible conceptual schemes should be given the chance to develop according to their own internal criteria. But institutionalized pluralism does not require that individual analysts be pluralists; rather, the contrary. Thus, the ideal head of a psychoanalytic institute represents pluralistic relativism on a level that allows for dogmatic realistic claims of truth in direct scholarly works.
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The director of a psychoanalytic organization that adopts a policy of institutionalized pluralism should encourage analysts to build new theories. He or she should devote considerable thought to understanding the creative processes responsible for the generation of psychoanalytic theories. There is no need for the director to be either postmodernist or positivist, but he or she does need to be convinced that generating new psychoanalytic theories is vital for the psychoanalytic future. The director should also have a natural aversion to fundamentalism of any kind. He or she should encourage analysts to discover their own creative voices without ignoring, forgetting, or denigrating what they have learned from others. What should lead the psychoanalytic institute is not a sentimental yearning for an institutional past when true ideas were inspirational, or for the comforting certainty of old theories. If we want our body of knowledge to become a science and an academic clinical discipline, we need to create a university-style model that encourages empirically based research that generates new knowledge and thick descriptions. At the same time, we need to have considerably more information about which theory best explains change in the clinical situation. I think that the issue of hypothesis testing in institutes has been a major problem in this regard. Formulating and testing hypotheses are distinct steps that must be kept separate. Unhappily, they have too often been conflated. As a result, schools had disciples and followers, rather than a group of investigators trying to validate f indings or develop them. The situation was not helped by a lack of univocal definitions (or anything even close) that would allow investigators to use the same meanings in moving on. New theories of mind should be subjected to empirical validation, and we ought to be able to observe phenomena in a reliable and valid way across settings. It is important that divergent theories be challenged, studied, compared, and evaluated empirically. They can be compared based on their compatibility with clinical material or with data from adjacent f ields; they can be evaluated for completeness, internal consistency, pragmatic usefulness, or ease of translation into clinical interventions. The crucial point is that it is the responsibility of institute directors to empower their analysts, make them feel relaxed and comfortable, encourage their generative capacities, and enable them to feel that they can be confident about their findings. At the same time, the director
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should not privilege any one doctrine as being superior to another. In such an institute, analysts will be able to focus on doing what they do bestexplaining human conduct, generating new terms and concepts for unexplained phenomena, and finding new meanings for things that happen in therapy and in peoples lives.
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