Response by Joseph D. Lichtenberg

I am extremely grateful to the five discussants, each of whom has given thoughtful consideration to my plenary address. I shall take up each of their presentations, attempting to clarify further my answers to their valuable critiques and commentaries.

Stuart Pizer's discussion expresses a welcome confirmation of the scale and scope I hoped my theoretical and technical proposals would achieve. Pizer's term paradox fits perfectly the nature of the systems approach I advocate. Systems involve organization, dialectical tension, and hierarchical rearrangement—something stable and something in flux, order within disorder, disorder within order. The five motivational systems I propose are an effort to provide conceptual clarity to a large body of observational and research data. The systems are ordered by the logic of their fit with multiple sources of data but primarily are processed through their fitness to the subjectivity of my experience as person, patient, and psychoanalyst. Of the many criteria that could be used to evaluate the power of the proposed theory and principles of technique, Pizer chooses clinical efficacy. He asks whether my work promotes a paradigm shift “at the level of the individual engaged in an analytic process.” Before offering his reason for answering in the affirmative, however, he cites another possibility—my psychoanalytic model of systems, techniques, and explanations of therapeutic action could be regarded as a Rube Goldberg contraption, neither fish nor fowl. I can understand how the conclusion could be reached that I have merely tinkered with existing theory. In Psychoanalysis and Motivation as I presented the evidence for each motivational system, I also noted the presentation of comparable theories—often offered as core explanations for motivation. So there is nothing new under the sun—only sex and aggression, object seeking, body ego, and competence in a different wrapper. However, under the same sun, plates of the polar cont