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Dear Editors,
Rachel Blass (2010) keeps emphasizing the value of truth. She calls for a “productive dialogue between opposing views” (p. 97), implying that the present climate of supposed ‘political correctness’ blocks such a dialogue, while her proposal for exclusive definitions will allow it. But the truth is the very opposite.
At present, within the IPA and on the pages of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis itself, such a dialogue indeed exists because analysts influenced by differing theoretical models co-exist within the same organizations and journals. If we accept Blass's wish for sharp definitions of what psychoanalysis is and what it is not, such a dialogue will come to an end because many points of view will be declared as ‘not truly psychoanalytic’ and therefore excluded and banished.
Blass's diagnosis of confusion “stifling thought” (p. 94) is unfounded. The fact that Kleinian psychoanalysis and Self Psychology (one of her prime examples; ibid.) differ considerably is well known and often thoroughly explored. The legitimacy of “overt expression of differences” (ibid.) is not at risk, as we all take it for granted. The question is whether such divergent schools could maintain their broader joint psychoanalytic identity and affiliation, as they do now, or should be forcefully broken apart, as Blass clearly wishes.
Blass says: “In this study I will not set forth my own views” (p. 84). Nevertheless, her views are quite explicit in this paper, and any informed reader will easily understand that she wishes to define psychoanalysis as “a practice based exclusively on the verbal interpretation of unconscious conflict” (p. 92) and therefore to exclude any “practice whose curative potential depends on the analyst fulfilling maternal needs which the patient consciously experiences to be absent” (ibid; the latter appears to be a gross caricature of Winnicott's views).
Her hostility to the views of Ferenczi, Balint, Winnicott, Kohut and Relational Psychoanalysis