Toward an Integrative Sensibility: Conversing Across Theoretical Boundaries

This is a time of dizzying cross-currents and cross-fertilizations—the results of the interplay of new technologies, a global village, and a plethora of rapidly emerging new ideas, theories, and models. It is a time calling for the transcendence of both the reifications of modernism and the postmodern threats of relativism and nihilism. We are addressing a psychoanalytic need in this pluralistic time, for self psychology to take up the challenge of broadening our horizons of belonging—incorporating neighboring ideas, genuine dialogue with other approaches, and an ideal of a sensibility that fosters integration where possible. We discuss some of the components of an integrative sensibility: attitudes of openness, curiosity, fallibilism, and complexification. We use the metaphor of immigrants arriving from different professional shores, speaking their own native tongues, facing the dilemma of holding onto their traditions as they encounter and embrace otherness. Calling upon Gadamer's idea of genuine conversation and Gendlin's focus on the implicit dimension of experience, we posit the “language of experience.”