Debating Well and its Obstacles

In this brief contribution, I revisit ideas that I have expressed over the past twenty years (e.g. Tuckett 1994, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2005, 2017, 2019, 2022; Tuckett et al. 2020) and collect them together to outline six significant and inter-related barriers currently in place which prevent psychoanalysts, on the whole, from having a productive debate with each other and also with those in other disciplines, or society more generally. There is, however, a way forward, which I will describe in the conclusion. Collectively, these six obstacles have produced a drift into “anything goes” rather than disciplined pluralism. They have also interfered with our ability effectively to deploy the extraordinary insights of psychoanalysis into the world of culture and society to useful and externally valued effect.

The six factors I see as influential are: (1) epistemological confusion; (2) endemic terminological confusion; (3) a psychoanalytic culture of persuasion; (4) the lack of a common observational base; (5) psychoanalytic exceptionalism; and (6) limitations of training. These six factors together create a tendency to basic assumption group rather than work group functioning (Bion 1961) and to arrogance and omnipotence.

In the space available I can only briefly elucidate each of these factors.

Psychoanalysts start their training with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. They are often ambivalent escapees from their core disciplines - for example, medicine, psychiatry and clinical psychology, and less often social science. They rarely have postgraduate research training of any kind but if they do it is likely to be from a particular disciplinary silo, which almost inevitably means drawing on a single favoured methodology - for example, experimental method, randomized controlled trials, neuropsychology, philosophy, hermeneutics, rhetoric, qualitative interviewing, participant observation, ethnography, etc. Within these disciplinary silos, epistemolo