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Increasingly, broad theories that seek to organize presumptive fields of inquiry are regarded as exaggerating truth claims while imposing procrustean distortions on how their proponents organize data. An alternate avenue to the creation of knowledge is to adopt a pluralistic system of comprehension that incorporates multiple perspectives. Here, the idea is to appreciate what each of the blind men offers about the elephant rather than to aggressively endorse the position of one of them. Sandra Yarock opens this issue of the Journal applying Fred Pine's Four Psychologies model to chronic bulimia. She illustrates the effectiveness of this epistemology.

Nevertheless, this postmodern approach to knowledge as observed in Yarock's work need not subvert the rich possibilities for comprehension provided by single theories. Susan Kavaler-Adler turns to object relations to address the question: How does the therapist contribute to the therapy? She underscores that if the analyst can withstand the preoedipal patient's guilty aggression, then the patient's capacity for mourning may emerge. In these patients, mourning may be for the idealized mother with whom symbiotic fusion is the essential desire. Kavaler-Adler insists that there must be sufficient internalization of the analyst as a whole object as well as an adequacy of dialogue between patient and therapist. This, she claims, enables a corresponding adequacy of dialogue within the patient between internal psychic structures.

The function of the therapist is likewise considered by Juana Canabal Antokoletz. For Antokoletz, the reconfiguring of psychic structures is necessary in the person who needs to negotiate what she terms cross-cultural passage. Acculturation, the concept of exchanging the old culture for the new, is rejected. In its place, Antokoletz recommends cultural transformation by which she means a creative synthesis arising intrapsychically from both the old and the new cultures, together. The therapist facilitates