The Concept of the Negative in Psychoanalysis: Commentary on Wilson

Mitchell Wilson's rich and complex paper reflects the growing interest of American psychoanalysts in perspectives outside the familiar ego psychology and object relations approaches in which we were trained. I believe it marks a dividing point in the evolution of psychoanalysis, one in which the divergence has become more pronounced between those who retain a strong commitment to a natural science model of mental function, linked with evolutionary biology, developmental research, and the neurosciences, and those turning to a hermeneutic, linguistic approach growing out of a philosophical literature on subjectivity. For a long time, this bifurcation, first elaborated by Paul Ricoeur (1961-1962) as the separate domains of force and meaning, was uneasily contained within the Freudian project. In Wilson's terms, the zone of potentially objective knowledge existed in dialectical tension with the realm of uncertainty and the unknown. Even though the ego psychologists' goal of identifying the causal mechanisms of the neuroses by a study of the vicissitudes of early (especially oedipal) conflicts was quietly retired some years ago, the objective of connecting adult symptoms to specific failures of early development has persisted. It would be satisfying to identify unconscious incestuous wishes that underlie neurotic problems in success or sexual relationships, for example, or to locate parental deficits in empathy, attunement, or attachment that have led to specific adult emotional problems. Needless to say, one can always find evidence for these and other plausible etiological factors in every analytic case. Hence the recurrent