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PSYCHOANALYSIS DEALS WITH AMBIGUITY and paradox. What has only one meaning and no other, what is specified logically and cannot escape that specification, is of little interest to us. Titles such as the one I have selected are designed to appeal to psychoanalysts. Which of the several meanings of psychoanalysis is intended? What is meant by "one" or "many?" Which is better? I will start by solving my riddle before I discuss it, and solving it in a most psychoanalytic way. Psychoanalysis is something we have constructed, not something we have discovered, and each of us reconstructs it in his or her own terms. It is sufficiently ambiguous that it is possible to reconstruct it as one or many, and individuals have followed each of those courses. Like many choices, the consequences of either option may be either good or bad, and the tension between them is one way of defining the contemporary field of discourse in psychoanalysis. It is common to find psychoanalysts who avoid that discourse by their certainty that either a unitary homogeneous psychoanalysis or a pluralistic heterogeneous one is good, while the other is bad, and who then proceed to define psychoanalysis so as to substantiate their preference. It is easy to construct psychoanalytic explanations for why individuals might make such decisions, or any other attempts to escape from ambiguity, but of course, it is also easy to construct explanations for a preference for preserving or even exaggerating ambiguity. However, before dissolving totally in this verbal fog, let us proceed.
A colleague presents a case at a conference. He emphasizes the difficulty managing the patient's stormy transference responses and frequent testing of the limits of the analytic situation. At one point he reveals that he was seeing the patient face to face three