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The kind of excess I wrote about in my paper grows inevitably out of the euphoria of discovery. Not much is more exciting, especially to those of us who have committed our lives to studying what it is like to be human, than coming upon something unexpected about how people's lives work and how we can touch them in ways that help. The excess arises from the belief that what we are seeing has never been seen before. For better or for worse, ours is not a discipline in which new discoveries are likely to be made. In a very real sense there can never be a “cutting edge” in psychoanalysis. Every one of our major themes has been explored and written about for over two thousand years.
So to talk about psychoanalytic “discoveries” is not quite accurate. More to the point, what changes is that figure and ground shift, new emphases emerge, the focus of clinical conversation is transformed. The changes are genuine and far-reaching, but the richness of our discipline is threatened when we see this kind of transformation as discovery, as obviating what has been talked about before. When we see ourselves as knowing something never before known, we run the risk of cutting ourselves off from our history, both the hundred-year history of psychoanalysis and the larger history of discourse in the humanities.
If the kind of splendid isolation that Freud claimed, and that has become a curious badge of honor for psychoanalytic movements ever since, is the problem, then dialogue among proponents of a range of perspectives is the solution. This shapes my reactions to the discussions of my paper. Because while I certainly have my disagreements with each of them, in the deepest sense I see them as endorsing the larger purpose of my paper, which is to promote a new kind of dialogue. I say