Commentary on Pine's “Psychoanalytic Dictionary”

In this paper, a distinguished psychoanalyst tackles the problems of how to think and practice coherently in an era of increasing theoretical diversity. In “The Psychoanalytic Dictionary: A Position Paper on Diversity and Its Unifiers,” Fred Pine searches for a metaphor to help him make sense of this new era, experimenting with several possibilities dealing with component parts of a whole. Metaphors of interest to him include “tribes” and “nations,” “pieces of a novel … with a known, main explanatory story line,” a psychoanalytic multiplex theatre with many stages on which the clinical drama unfolds, and the disease model of illness with its various interacting features.

Mostly, however, Pine is intrigued with the metaphor of a psychoanalytic “dictionary,” a compilation of observations, formulations, ideas, concepts, and pieces of theory. The dictionary metaphor leads him naturally to the ancillary metaphor of a “language” to which his dictionary is linked. Pine suggests that we locate psychoanalytic “diversity” in the alphabet and vocabulary of the dictionary and psychoanalytic “unifiers” in the grammar and the core assumptions of the language for which the dictionary is a guide. By working with these linked metaphors, Pine's hope is to create a “conceptual housing” for what he describes as “an increasingly common stance among clinicians who willingly draw from diverse theories as they are applicable to the immediate clinical moment,” as well as for our current state of theory making, in which we operate with “no single [theory that] … fully meets our clinical needs.” While a major goal of Pine's paper is to