On: Responding to Rachel Blass' Article ‘Affirming “That's not Psycho-Analysis!” On the value of the Politically Incorrect act of Attempting to Define the Limits of Our Field’

Dear Editors,

In her argument for a limiting definition of psychoanalysis, Rachel B. Blass (2010) creates a series of false dichotomies that threaten to polarize the field. Using the rhetoric of a call for ‘truth,’ she argues that we should define psychoanalysis based on its ‘essence,’ its ‘meaning,’ and its ‘nature.’ By contrast, she trivializes the alternative, which she dismisses under the rubric of ‘postmodernism,’ ‘relativism,’ or ‘social-constructivism,’ claiming that these approaches lead to a radical relativism in which we are left with nothing but opinions, one of which is as good as the next, and without rational arguments to mediate among them.

But this polarization is itself a misrepresentation and distortion of the ‘truth,’ since there are many versions of, and a variety of approaches to postmodernism and constructivism, and the version of ‘constructivism’ used by most analysts is not nearly as radical as Blass portrays. (Irwin Hoffman, among others, has articulated this position with great care throughout his work.) In critical-constructivism one expects that there may be more than one compelling way to see and interpret an event but that hardly means that anything goes. Some alternatives may be implausible. But even the plausible options are open to rational debate as to which is to be preferred, debate in which moral, aesthetic, and pragmatic considerations will have their place. Blass dismisses all of this subtle thinking, suggesting that social constructivism leaves us with nothing but personal opinions or preferences.

The question to my mind is not what is the truth, nature, or essence of psychoanalysis, but rather, what are the consequences of defining psychoanalysis one way or another and to whom? Under what social, economic, cultural, historical, political conditions does defining psychoanalysis in one way or another lead to benefits or disadvantages to patients, and/or to particular groups of professionals, including those who do indeed identify