Potholes on the Royal Road: Or Is It An Abyss?*

Jay Greenberg (1995), in an editorial written soon after he assumed the editorship of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, wrote the following:

[A] century after Breuer and Freud announced that they had discovered a cure for some of the world's most intractably incurable afflictions, little of the familiar foundation of psychoanalysis remains unchallenged. Few analysts today feel comfortable with Freud's structural model of the mind, or with his technical prescriptions about detachment and abstinence, or with his positivistic philosophy of science. Virtually all the traditional conceptual, clinical, and epistemological premises that guided psychoanalysis through its first hundred years are being called into question. [p. 6]

If this is accurate, and I for one believe it is, where does that leave psychoanalysts who write, now that there is no routine theoretical “mainstream” for an analyst to support or oppose? We are gradually eliminating what used to be our greatest dread, the accusation of being called “unanalytic,” because it is becoming meaningless for an author to be called “unanalytic” when we can't really agree on what it means to be “analytic.” But take heart—all is not lost. Although this makes writing analytic papers and books a much more humbling experience for the author because there aren't any “experts” anymore, it also makes writing a much more interesting experience than ever before. Not being so sure of what we know allows us the pleasure of freer self-expression, which, as most of us have discovered the hard way, is interesting not only in the opportunity it offers for growth, but also “interesting” in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

If we less often write in order to present marvelous new “evidence,”