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Dear Editors,
In IJP 93(2) R. S. Wallerstein (2012) addresses the insularity of psychoanalysis, suggesting ways in which psychoanalysis might secure a stronger position within the university where it has the potential to intersect with other disciplines. However, it is not clear whether psychoanalysis has been structured as a discipline at all (as considered by Freud). Other recent articles in the IJP have looked at why psychoanalysis fails to integrate with ‘outside’ fields. Namer (2011) suggests that psychoanalytical groups are consolidated via their ‘search for an object’, related to professional practice, and influencing theory. One of the theoretical effects of the group ‘object choice’ has been to delete the differences between psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy. Such groups tend to uphold ‘postmodern’ ideas, which oppose academic formalizations of knowledge, but at the same time they sustain a definitive monistic truth, like the one they criticize, focusing on individualistic ways of thinking which increases the failure of psychoanalysis to intersect with ‘outside’ disciplines.
I would like to add that the development of the professionalization of psychoanalysis has created further problems for its integration with the ‘outside’. It has encouraged simplified classifications of psychoanalysis as a natural science, a humanistic science, or a kind of hermeneutics (as well as fostering naïve views of science based on empirical research or confrontations between quantitative and qualitative research). In endorsing scientific-philosophical pluralism, the professionalization of psychoanalysis is also dangerously opposed to a methodology of knowledge.
Influenced by Bhaskarian thought (Epstein, 2010), my central argument is that every discipline should be understood to have its own epistemology and methodology, a singular combination determined by the ontology of its object and the practical circumstances in which knowledge is applied, thus including definiti