You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I want to begin by thanking the discussants for such rich and interesting responses to my paper. The highly particular and varied manner in which these distinguished authors approached the same paper highlights how individual and personal is psychoanalytic theorizing. They have picked up on different aspects of what I have written, or on the same aspect from different angles, depending on their own sense of how psychoanalytic
thought has developed and where it needs to go. Each discussion enriches the paper in its own particular way, and taken together they raise more questions and issues than could possibly be addressed in this context. I would like to focus primarily on two issues that touch most closely on my own purposes in writing the paper: the question of the role of theory in clinical practice raised by Fliegel and the question of Kohut's contribution to psychoanalytic technique raised by Tolpin.
I regard the polarized positions that tend to develop in discussions of the relationship between theory and practice as unfortunate. They discourage us from being more aware of what we think and thus of conducting an ongoing critical evaluation of the clinical implications and usefulness of differing theories. Fliegel seems to suggest that if one is acknowledging a particular theoretical orientation, the motivation is likely to be defensiveness, and the inevitable consequence is therapeutic rigidity—a direct open engagement of the patient's experience is hopelessly compromised. Some read Freud's sage advice to us regarding “evenly hovering attention” as an injunction to elevate an ideal of seamless digestion of theory and technique or a hope that we can successfully hold theory at bay, suspending it and later calling it into mind at will and thus protecting ourselves from charges of rigidity and imposition.
I think we do better in this regard in allowing that we are researchers as well as philosophers, and here I am in agreement with