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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then.… I contradict myself;
I am large. I contain multitudes.
It is quite unexpected to be writing my reply amid these unprecedented times of global pandemic, amid political, healthcare, economic, and environmental instability; widespread protests against systemic racism; and a dismal failure of moral and unifying leadership. This is a harrowing time for many, yet not necessarily traumatic for everyone, for reasons my article addresses in positing trauma's triadic nature (as grounded in economic, intrapsychic, and object-relational understandings).
I will return to trauma and psychoanalysis shortly; however, after reading the commentaries on my article, I am perplexed by my interloutors' ostensible difficulty in understanding certain of my ideas, concepts, and terms. More troubling, though perhaps not surprising given our profession's long-standing schisms, is that two of them either misunderstood or neglected the essence of my thesis, and instead of raising questions that might draw out ideas and clarify any confusion, a straw man argument was created merely to be refuted.
So, as we might anticipate, the concerns addressed in my paper's historical section are repeated in a veritable parallel process that calls to mind Yogi Berra's “It's déjà vu all over again.” In short, as I will elaborate, the commentaries run the risk of deepening schisms where there might otherwise simply be animated tensions arising from the differences that conceptualizing analysts bring to the discussion.