“That’s What You Say”: Reply to Levine and Stern

A joke I heard in graduate school: A young philosopher is working deep into the night. Feverish and sleep deprived, he struggles to craft a solution to the great philosophical dilemmas posed by sages from the past. Exhausted by his efforts, he falls into a deep sleep on his bed and begins to dream. In his dream, all the great philosophers—Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, and others—come before him, one by one, to present their arguments, and one by one, the young philosopher refutes them all. To each, he offers a devastating critique, so powerful that each of them disappears in a puff of smoke. The young man awakens briefly, and, recalling the dream, he stumbles to his desk to record his shattering critique while he can still remember it. He manages to scribble it down before collapsing again into sleep. When he awakens fully the next morning, he remembers the dream but not his retort, and is relieved when he recalls that he wrote it down. Rushing to his desk he sees, written in his own wobbly hand, the following: “That’s what you say.”

We psychoanalysts often find ourselves in a similar position. We read, we write, we argue over differing theoretical positions, but in the end, our replies devolve into something like the young philosopher’s retort: “Well, that’s what you say.” We have little alternative, as we have few consensually agreed upon criteria by which we could validate a construct, or confirm one theory and disconfirm another. Levine, citing Bion, argues that the only criterion for evaluating a psychoanalytic theory

should be its clinical usefulness. Sounds reasonable, except that there is virtually no evidence that any one psychoanalytic theory is more