Response to Commentaries

“Therapeutic Action and the Analyst's Responsibility” reflects my attempt to locate the vastly different approaches to the problem of what works in psychoanalysis within the larger theoretical structures in which they are embedded. In my effort to do so I made a choice that was bound to stir controversy: I decided to characterize as “controlling fictions” the overarching assumptions that shape psychoanalytic theories. I made this choice in order to sharpen differences and to provoke conversation, and reading these three commentaries I see that my strategy has worked. The disagreements with my argument are clear, and taken together they raise questions that are vital for the way we think about and understand our work.

A word about why I thought that the more provocative term was needed. Certainly some rough equivalents are available; I could have written about “master narratives,” “overarching metaphors,” even “psychoanalytic theories.” Each of these is used more frequently than “controlling fiction,” which as far as I know I have made up myself. Certainly narrative, metaphor, and theory are all more familiar to psychoanalysts.

Unfortunately, this very familiarity facilitates a looseness in the way a term is used. For example, Madeleine Baranger (2005) characterizes as a metaphor her vision of the psychoanalytic situation as a dynamic field, but she then goes on to say that “the analytic situation does not correspond to a psychology of the individual” (p. 62; emphasis added). Similarly, Civitarese and Ferro (2013) understand that their version of field theory is a metaphor, but nevertheless assert that “the individual's proto-mental system … cannot … be studied in isolation” from the proto-mental system of the group (p. 124; emphasis added). Notice the slippage: prescriptions that are meant to be taken literally (“does not correspond,” “cannot … be studied”) are derived from descriptions that are acknowledged to be metaphorical, creating a jarring shift in the level of