Commentaries

New ideas need to highlighted, often to the exclusion of others, in order to be noticed. But then older, still valuable ideas often are forgotten. This is a paradox we need to struggle with. Jay Greenberg has written a provocative and courageous paper. It is a bold step for him to confront what he perceives as the excess of relational theory, since he himself is one of its founders. Offering illustrations showing that theoretical excess is not new to our field, he places in historical context the tendency of psychoanalytic theories to become immoderate. While he does not specifically address the dialectical nature of swings in theory, he makes a plea for not discarding the old when we embrace the new. He distinguishes cogently between a theory and its application. It is in the latter, in this instance, that he perceives an excess. The implication of his concern is that certain tenets may be extrapolated from the clinical stance assumed by analysts identified with a given theoretical position which then are treated as, or may become principles of, the theory itself. Although relational theorists maintain that “there is no way … to assert a priori the benefit of any technical intervention,” Greenberg points