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.
Psychoanalysts may quote the physicist Werner Heisenberg at least as much as they do Edgar Levenson. Like Levenson, Heisenberg is associated with a revolution in his field, his “relativity principle,” contributing to the shift from classical physics to the modern world of quantum theory (Heisenberg, 1952). Fonagy (2001), for instance, credits Sullivan for traveling “halfway to Heisenberg” because he “put great emphasis on the analyst's participation in and impact on what he is observing” (p. 132). Similarly, Aron (1996), in questioning analytic neutrality, mentions that Heisenberg “demonstrated that the position of the observer and the acts of observation influence the nature of the data gathered” (p. 256). Elsewhere in this volume, Feiner recalls “Heisenberg's alluring idea of uncertainty,” in which his measurement of data “had some effect on it.”
Yet these references neglect the principle behind the conclusions they venerate. Heisenberg first observed that “certain pairs of quantum properties, such as position and momentum, can never both be precisely defined at the same time” (Gribbin, 2004, p. 520). Furthermore, the more accurately one variable is measured, the less so the other. Known to physicists in terms of “wave particle duality,” for Levenson it is the appreciation that any single idea or thesis is limited by omission, more so as it is realized, for one can never know where one is, and where one is going at the same time. Or, as Friedman echoes in his praise of Levenson's shifting emphases, “Putting too much weight on any given pronouncement already reveals a misperception of the field.” To apply this to metatheory and not only the clinical moment, Greenberg (2001) comments