Controversial Discussions

Open disciplined debate is the best device scholarship has for protecting itself against descent into scholasticism. Yet psychoanalysts, like all who inhabit the domain of ideas, are ever vulnerable to letting a desire for personal primacy overwhelm the deeper goal of expanding the realm of knowledge.

Although often thought of as a static body of accumulated information, science is a living being. It absorbs new knowledge, struggles to digest and assimilate that knowledge, changing its shape and growing, at times at a glacial pace, at others in dizzying leaps. Whatever the wonders that contribute to its growth, science is a product of the human mind, a body of knowledge that exists, and matters, only as it resides in and is dealt with by the human mind.

Even though new ideas may defy earlier understandings, they are born in the context of past knowledge. As a result, new views are not always welcomed with open arms. The more threatening the new understandings, the more likely they will face the wall of a “compact majority.” Psychoanalysis has known this experience since its inception, a fact that likely accounts for much of the persistence of the public claim that psychoanalysis is dead.

Even within the professional arena, some discussions are singled out as especially controversial; those between the followers of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein are doubtless the best known instance of this. And how can we account for the intensity of such debates? Is it to be dismissed as mere growing pains, a difficulty in accommodating to spurts of growth once a body moves beyond childhood into burgeoning adolescence?

Perhaps, but surely there is more that accounts for the intensity of emotion in our conceptual battles. Workers care, and care deeply. When embattled, we tend too quickly—in our own vanity—to impute narcissism to others as the motive of their arguments. Quite naturally, we care most about ideas we have ourselves conceived, labored to deliver, struggled to refine. However,