You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The title of this book might well capture the imagination of all those more than a little interested in the development of theory building whatever the areas of study. How does one theory emerge from another? Who fashioned it and how and with whom? Who influenced it and why and when? And is any theory at any given time really any different from what has come before? So many curiosities arise about the touchings that go on between theories. And
none more so perhaps than in the wide open field of psychoanalysis - an arena replete with the complexities of human nature and relationships in which there is so little that is tangible and so much that is possible. The business of a theory is to make sense of complexities, to construct a speculative ‘system of ideas or statements explaining something’ based on ‘a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment and is accepted as accounting for known facts’ (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). In psychoanalysis, this theoretical endeavour has led to a veritable efflorescence of ideas, clustered and reconfigured in all kinds of ways, as more and more practitioners - turned theorists - tumble into the fray adding this conviction and that almost at random as they seek to understand the mysteries that confront them.
Theory building in psychoanalysis seems to have no bounds. Psychoanalytic theorists, faced as they are with their observations of people whether or not in treatment, weave various patterns of ideas that are often as much to do with their own personal experiences, assumptions and values.
As psychoanalysts have taken on a wider variety of patients, so their theories have multiplied to take account of fresh observations. This may well be a cause for celebration but for some it is worrying. For them, there are simply too many theories, separate, idiosyncratic, in rivalry and competition. Fonagy and Target (2003) have argued, for example, that the way in which most psychoanalytic theories