Psychoanalytic Praxis and the Moral Vision of Psychoanalysis: Brief Communication on a Paper by Kenneth Isold

The State of Knowledge and authority in psychoanalysis is rapidly expanding and shifting. Postmodernism, hermeneutics, and social constructivism have thoroughly permeated psychoanalytic theory and practice, leading many analytic writers to question, reinterpret, and even dispense with some basic psychoanalytic tenets and assumptions. Traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as neutrality, interpretation, free association, and the unconscious have been dramatically reshaped over the last several decades. This “reshaping” has provoked a crisis of sorts, leaving many analysts scrambling for a stable mooring to ground their identities as analysts.

During this time of transition between paradigms, it is rare to find cogent and illuminating communications that capture the important current difficulties and tensions while providing a way to orient future thinking and practice. In a recent article in this journal, entitled “The Rediscovery of the Unknown: An Inquiry into Psychoanalytic Praxis,” Kenneth Eisold (2000) has offered such a piece. He provides a thoughtful, focused, sensitive, and timely contribution to the ongoing effort of contemporary analytic writers and clinicians to carve out an alternative to objectivism and relativism. He shows that issues related to the unconscious, analytic authority, the therapist's personal influence, and the impact of contrasting interpretive approaches cut across theoretical divides within the psychoanalytic world. More specifically, Eisold points out that in spite of widely divergent interests and approaches proliferating the contemporary psychoanalytic literature, therapists of all stripes continue to struggle with (and often avoid or deny) the unknown—in patients, clinical work, and themselves. He sets out to address this issue by clarifying the nature of analytic work and by sketching a framework for understanding what is meant by the “analytic task.” In this brief response to his article, I touch