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 MUTUAL INSENSITIVITIES of interpersonal and object relations theories to each other are remarkable. Not so remarkable, perhaps, if one keeps in mind Witenberg's (1976) comments about dogma and the "need to believe" in the face of uncertainty.
Psychoanalytic politics can be likened to religious sectarianism. Belief systems tend to atrophy into self-perpetuating dogmas. Karl Mannheim's (1936) speculations on the sociology of knowledge are germane. He indicates how "ideologies" function to stabilize a social order. Both "churches"—interpersonal and object relations—have perhaps needed to hold to ideologies built on selective inattention to differeing beliefs. Dialectical exchanges between the "churches" are hindered by pre-syntactic experiences, each of the other.
In the context of rapid growth of possibilities and technologies for international scientific communication, little exchange goes on. American psychoanalysis has been relatively impervious to the penetration of the "English school." This speaks to a primitive xenophobia which needs to preserve its ideologies.
Erikson has called this global fragmentation of the human species "pseudospeciation." "Pseudospeciation" grows from the need to be "in" by making others "out, " to exaggerate one's plumage to escape from the nakedness of being simply more human than otherwise. Erikson's concept addresses how "while man is obviously one species, he appears and continues on earth split up into groups … which provide their members with a firm sense of God-given identity—and a sense of immortality" (Erikson 1975, p. 176). He continues, "this demands, however, that each group