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July 14, 2002. We were surprised to find ourselves presented in the introduction to Phyllis Tyson's “Challenges of Psychoanalytic Developmental Theory” ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 50/1) as paradigmatic of such “purists” as André Green, who has argued that excessive attention to empirical research is damaging to psychoanalysis, and Peter Wolff, who has written about “the irrelevance of infant observation for psychoanalysis” ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 44/1). The central argument in our recent paper, “Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality: Do We Need a New Theory?” ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 49/4), to which Tyson referred, is that when psychoanalysis has tried to go it alone in the business of theory making, the results have often been disastrous. This has been so not only when analysts have attempted to create developmental theories about the etiology of homosexuality, but also in both psychoanalytic theories of severe mental illness and in early theories about female sexuality. As we make clear in our paper, it was only when challenged with data from other disciplines that psychoanalysis was forced to confront shortcomings in these theories.
We also argue that confusion between the developmental point of view and the genetic point of view has created a major blind spot in psychoanalytic theory making about homosexuality. These points of view were most clearly (and we think accurately) delineated by Hartmann in 1951. The psychoanalytic clinical setting does include a developmental point of view inasmuch as analysts do directly observe the development of adults over time, and child analysts certainly do observe the development of children over time. However, for the most part, psychoanalysts have direct access to observations made only from the genetic point of view. When we assert that the developmental point of view, in contrast to the genetic, is not psychoanalytic, we mean that it is not (again in contrast to the genetic) dependent upon a method of observation unique t