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In “Exploring Theory Integration,” Brook and Hanly boldly state that “psychoanalysis is first and foremost a clinical science” and that “clinical facts are the primary source of the facts about psychic reality.” In the spirit of full disclosure, I declare myself the holder of a rather different view, that although psychoanalysis has installed itself as a clinical discipline, and legitimately so, it is first and foremost an evolving movement in a broader cultural development: psychoanalysis does not and cannot deal with “facts” that have a “primary source;” it deals rather with shifting constellations of the very processes of unconscious activity and defence that Freud helped us to conceptualize—but always in the contingent form made available by a particular culture, society, or period of history.
Having said this, I do think this is an excellent article because it suggests a way of containing the infinite epistemological regress of psychoanalytic theorizing within a secure and reasonable methodological frame. The authors make no claim to have discovered a direct pipeline to clinical truth. Although the stated aim of the article is to streamline the psychoanalytic explanation of the way the mind works, what it is really about, in my reading, is the need for clarification of what is useful clinically at the conceptual level. Although the article emphasizes formal philosophical methods of conceptual analysis, all of which are interesting and valid so far as they go, the real import of the article is its proposal for an ongoing, collective, high-level reflection on our working concepts as we use them under the changing conditions of practice. In this regard, the article represents a further refinement and also perhaps a step beyond the approach that has been developed in association with David Tuckett's (2005) method