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To what extent does the amalgamation of psychoanalytic theories weaken those same theories through homogenization and dilution? Perhaps repairing a defect in one theory with a competency from another damages both. In our last issue, we followed Michael Robbins, who injected a Fairbairnian perspective into self psychology. Briefly commenting on Robbins' position in this issue, Althea Horner joins in support of a broad vision of object relations that integrates nicely with self psychology. But then, notes Horner, self psychologists need to renounce the claims of their theory to specialness.

In a similar vein though on a different subject, we find Leland van den Daele's efforts to conceive of the dream as a general-purpose language. His preceding work on this project is found in Number 2 of this journal volume. Referring to his approach as the method of direct interpretation, van den Daele seeks to unburden the dream-interpreting clinician of oppressive metapsychologies. According to van den Daele, dreams deserve to be sorted on one axis by origin—endogenous, exogenous, or relational—and on a second axis by complexity of internal organization. His typology of dreams arguably possesses the very real virtue of accommodating existing theories of dream interpretation. Again, though, as Horner demands of self psychology, the proponents of each theory must then renounce claims of specialness or superior insight.

Cutting below theories of psychoanalysis stands the hermeneutic phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. As Richard Chessick explicates Heidegger, it is the ordinary and the pedestrian, the mindless coping skills of the everyday from which derive conscious thoughts, mental representations, and all our theories in whatever discipline one chooses. What we call ourselves, human, is embedded and inseparable from the cultural matrix. The background practices of ordinary living that constitute culture and define the person are, according to Chessick, the same background practices