Commentary on "Psychoanalytic Discourse at the Turn of Our Century: A Plea for a Measure of Humility"

I am grateful for Arnold Richards's invitation to respond to his paper. Richards's interest in promoting this discussion in the pages of JAPA is evidence of a change in the wind in American psychoanalysis, the very change Richards himself writes about. His stated ideal of intellectual parity between Freudian and interpersonal/relational views is more than welcome. Unfortunately, his paper is marred by a blind spot concerning the power relations between our two groups. Nevertheless, I appreciate Richards's stated intention very much. How different things were in the recent past! When I was a candidate at the William Alanson White Institute in the 1970s, no psychoanalytic journal other than Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis accepted papers written by our faculty members.

Perhaps there was some tendency in those days, as Richards claims, for interpersonalists to define ourselves by our opposition to Freudian thinking. Power differentials, after all, are always reflected in the ideas of both those who dominate and those who are dominated. Remember that the interpersonal perspective began as an alternative point of view. And keep in mind that Freudian views, once the interpersonal perspective began to be articulated, were influenced by the intention to defeat the challenge, just as interpersonal views were partly shaped by mounting it. However we characterize the motives involved, though, interpersonalists were always more interested in formulating a strong view of psychoanalysis than in competing with other schools of thought. My generation of interpersonal writers (I completed my training twenty years ago) benefited from the battles our teachers and analysts had already fought and the work they had already done in establishing the point of view with which we all identified. They had carved out a niche in psychoanalysis that we were free to occupy (though they