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I very much appreciated Dr Duncan's frank, engaging, open-minded account of his way of proceeding 'from listening to interpretation'. I certainly agree with him that today's psychoanalytic world is increasingly pluralistic and that, accordingly, analysts now have an opportunity either to choose from among a variety of modes of listening and intervening, or to try to find ways to combine their best features. I also agree that these modes originate not only in different systems of psychoanalytic thought and theoretical contributions of original thinkers, but also in the retained personal belief-systems which have been the raw material that our educational experiences have more or less shaped. The latter point deserves emphasis.
Dr Duncan's tone is consistently celebratory, and not without reason; however, there is also a dark side to pluralism. This dark side includes incompatible understandings of clinical material, irreconcilable differences of method and interpretation, and the frequent undecidability of questions concerning analytic progress. For the sake of balance, the following discussion is offered to articulate this other side of recent historical developments.
The best place for me to begin this job, I have decided, is with Dr Duncan's illustrative clinical account, for as I read it I soon realised that I was witnessing an analytic scene and hearing an analytic dialogue rather different from the one he had presented. Before turning to some theoretical considerations of the burdens imposed by pluralism, and in order to ground those considerations in concrete experience—'in vivo' to use Dr Duncan's phrase—I want to review in detail my alternative reading of his material.
Dr Duncan's report begins with Mrs Brown's row with her husband, a man she describes as having 'charming little ways', a gang of admiring male friends, an inflated sense of importance, a tendency to use silence punitively, and an inclination to deny conflict—all of which she sees as coverin