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Irecently found myself saying to a colleague that I used to feel like I could speak to both my east coast and west coast sensibilities, but that I was losing my ability to speak my former east coast language; and I was not sure if that was a good or a bad thing. This brought to the surface a myriad of questions: What is it that we gain or lose when we transition from one theory to another? What are the inherent tensions that exist in transitioning from one language to a new one, or many languages? Is it that we are only engaging in a “sloppy fruit salad” of investigation, as Stephen Mitchell once put it, or is it possible to integrate multiple theories as a way to conduct psychoanalytic work?
Although I have powerfully landed in what I consider to be the purist sensibility of Intersubjective Systems Theory, does it mean that other theories cannot seem useful? How “correct” is any one theoretical orientation, given that theory is limited and can never cover the entirety of experience? How have my analytic institutes and valued supervisors shaped my theories and efforts toward a professional self-delineation as a relatively new analyst? These are the concurrent issues I pondered that day.
My first psychoanalytic language was born of my original social work training that included Bowlby, Winnicott, Sullivan, Fairburn, and other theorists of the British Middle School and the interpersonalist traditions, all of whom formed the pillars of my critical early training. Over time, their ideas evolved into more bidirectional notions of the relational school, which further influenced my clinical work. What I loved, and still love, about my social work training was the elegant, metaphoric way in which many relational schools wrote about their transference and counter-transference experiences with their patients. Christopher Bollas and Donnell Stern were on the forefront of this style of writing when I was a social work student 22 years ago. That my patient's bio-psychosocial an