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Based in part on my experience as editor of the Controversies section of the IJP in the past years, it is my understanding that when analysts fail to debate well it is tied to three main factors:
Focused debates are founded on more fundamental worldviews: Significant debates of differences between approaches ultimately boil down to different worldviews or visions, and on two difference levels. There are different views of what psychoanalysis is about, what defines its theory, practice and aims; and there are different views regarding the nature of the person and, related to this, what constitutes pathology and cure. For example, the differences that would emerge in a debate between “late Bion” intersubjectivists and Kleinians on whether or not the interpretation of unconscious phantasy is a good thing will ultimately be based on more fundamental differences between them in their views of human nature, emotional and cognitive development, the basic challenges the individual faces in life as well as how one conceives of the task of being an analyst or the meaning of a specifically analytic cure, for example, whether cure is centred on the integration of what is unconsciously known and yet split off to avoid guilt, or on opening the patient to never formulated experience due to environmental deficits. Similarly, debates regarding the relevance of neuroscience to psychoanalysis ultimately may be seen to be debates on different conceptions of the aims of psychoanalysis and of the mind. In this context one may suggest that while many analytic schools consider the analytic process to be one of the gradual unfolding of meaning as it emerges in the interactions between patient and analysts, neuropsychoanalysis adopts a more psychiatric perspective, for example offering patients explanations of their predicaments based on what has been statistically associated with biological correlates of such predicaments.
The fact that what seems like focused debates are actually founded on