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In a telling passage towards the end of Generation, Jean White reflects on the omnipotence inherent in any attempt to synthesize psychoanalytic paradigms, especially paradigms as diverse and influential as the three she has invited us to consider in her book: the Independent, Winnicottian tradition, the Lacanian, and the post-Kleinian. For Independents, to seek such a synthesis would be to refuse ‘the bracing developmental shock of a confrontation
with external difference’; for Lacanians it would mean staying caught up in the ‘Imaginary’, the illusion that reality can be made to conform to one's own narcissistic image. It would also be psychotic. Post-Kleinians, from their distinctive standpoint, would agree: it would be proof of an inability to adopt different perspectives, to engage with Bion's ‘multiple vertices’ in favour of a delusional state of single-minded certainty. White cites Lacan: ‘… there is no Other of the Other’. Authentic engagement with symbolic meaning involves accepting the absolute otherness of the Other and, bearing one's own lack, the inevitable partiality of one's vision.
The passage is telling on several levels. It exemplifies the reflective quality of White's thinking; it is evidence of a critical agility founded not just in an intellectual grasp of complex theory, but also in the author's feel for the particular theoretical and cultural idiom, the elusive emotional atmosphere, of each of the post-Freudian traditions she addresses. Above all, it underlines the central purpose of her project: far from an attempt at synthesis, her book is an extended argument for analytic pluralism, something not just desirable, but mandatory. For:
The capacity to hold in mind or consider a variety of perspectives at the same time constitutes, in and of itself, a therapeutic instrument of equivalent significance to … the notion of deep containment … the ability to think pluralistically, without forced synthesis, is one of the most potent weapons against ideol