Anna Aragno Responds to Review

August 3, 2002. I read with regret Mary Target's review of my book Symbolization: Proposing a Developmental Paradigm for a New Psychoanalytic Theory of Mind (JAPA, 50/1), less for its tone than for its failure to identify or grasp many of the reconceptualizations that are the heart of the book's content and purpose.

Rather than address the revisions that are proposed, the reviewer resorts to dismissives, correctives, and judgments, meted out with an authoritative grandeur that leaves little room for debate. The acidic aftertaste left on the palate of the “innocent reader” of such a review is due to the subtle, yet unmistakable, flavor of “seniority” with which it is imbibed. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the book was derived from my dissertation, a point the reviewer considers worth mentioning.

Unfortunately, in her fervor to rush in and criticize my unorthodox “style” and poorly structured sentences, Target fails to look carefully enough beyond their imperfect form to see the conceptual complexities they actually refer to. This pervasive interpretive discrepancy between what is written and how it is read, a classic symptom of “epistemological dissonance,” produces an alarmingly distorted picture of the book's content. I believe both derisions and distortions to be due to a total absence of a joint, or compatible, conceptual and referential framework, and hence to a genuine failure in understanding what the revision is all about. This is precisely what Kuhn alerted us to, what I expected, and what indeed occurs in the midst of a paradigm shift: the entrenchment of the reviewer in the conceptual mold of an old world-view beautifully illustrates what happens when different paradigms meet. Epistemologically, philosophically, and methodologically, Target and I live on different planets! And, as Saint-Exupery so poetically noted, different planets go by different laws. The very nature of the principles underlying this paradigm shift are “invisible” to those on Targe