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Years ago, Loewenstein (1957) suggested that the analyst should act as if theory didn't exist. This extreme position—perhaps only possible for an analyst so secure in his theory that he cannot distinguish it from fact—nonetheless echoes a persistent theme in our literature. We must try not only to avoid suggesting to the patient what he thinks or feels, but we must try to avoid prefiguring for ourselves what we will come to understand. We need an open mind.
There are many expressions of this idea, a kind of clinical common sense. Freud himself wrote to Ferenczi: “one should not make theories—they must fall into one's house as uninvited guests while one is occupied with the investigation of detail” (Falzeder & Brabant, 1996, p. 74). But as we also know, Freud made theory into shibboleths, a basis for professional warfare. The battlefield of psychoanalytic history is littered with the corpses of those theoretical conflicts. It may be, as Cooper (1997) and Weinshel (1990) have argued, that we have matured to the point where we can now profit from our theoretical diversity, but that has not simplified the problem of the relation between theory and practice.
Indeed, with the growing plurality of theoretical schools, as well as the postpositivist turn in our thinking about theory itself and its relation to truth, there is a new urgency about our relation to the observational data of psychoanalysis. On one hand, we cannot presume any definitively correct theoretical framework. Even if we are ourselves persuaded about the truth of our own particular orientation, we are forced to be modest about its claim on reality. Respectable and accepted practitioners hold to different theoretical orientations (see Hamilton, 1997). This is the lesson of pluralism. On the other hand, we are increasingly forced to recognize that the facts, the data themselves, are always imbued with meaning. That is, there is no clear distinction to be made between facts and theories; there is no place to st