Response to Eagle and Wolitzky

I am going to respond to Eagle and Wolitzky's critique (2011) of my plenary essay (Hoffman 2009) largely by quoting selectively from their commentary and addressing their arguments in a partial point-by-point manner. Not everything will be addressed, but I hope the overall spirit of my position will come across so that it will be possible to infer what I might say regarding many points I do not take up explicitly.

1. When they suggest that I am unnecessarily polarizing, Eagle and Wolitzky and other critics (e.g., Safran, Strenger, and Fonagy in articles forthcoming in Psychoanalytic Dialogues) overlook certain aspects of my viewpoint that are actually in keeping with their own. Two especially stand out, as I believe is made clear by two passages in my essay. One is my own critique of “objectivism” in traditional case studies and in theorizing on the basis of clinical experience. To quote just a few words from an extensive statement on this point:

my critique of the premises for the privileging of systematic quantitative research and of neuroscience is not accurately lined up with the divide between the psychoanalytic practitioner and the psychoanalytic researcher; it is rather lined up with the broader divide between constructivism and objectivism in psychoanalysis, a divide that can be located within the community of non-research-oriented psychoanalytic clinicians (Hoffman 1998) [2009, p. 1045].

The second counterpoint to the idea that I am polarizing concerns the place in analytic practice of research within the framework of “dialectical constructivism.” In that regard, I wrote:

In fact, ironically, the critical constructivist position to which I subscribe encourages an openness to collaborative consideration by analyst and analysand of more ways of working and understanding—in some instances well-researched—than are likely to be entertained within a more traditional, objectivistic psychoanalytic stance (see Hoffman 2006a) [2009, p. 1055].

The critics largely ignore th