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Recently, I have given some invited talks at psychoanalytic institutes around the country and have found with dismay that old analytic certitude is alive and well. I thought it had died. The certitude extends from knowing what psychoanalysis is to knowing its correct procedure and proper outcome and then—in response to my talks—to knowing what I have done wrong. I particularly hate that last certitude about what I have done wrong.
Here’s an example: after I had described an intimate therapeutic exchange, a senior analyst at a Midwestern institute rose and with a booming voice announced, “But your interpretation didn’t begin with what happened between the two of you in the previous session! Why not?” Her volume and tone accused, tried, and convicted me of something bad—on the spot, publicly, and with great contempt! By not referring to the previous therapy session, I had evidently violated one of her procedural analytic shibboleths; and in doing so I had aroused her defensive ire.
The analyst’s righteous certainty at first took me aback. Rigid adherence to theory seems passé to me: dynamic systems thinking suggests convincingly that the maps of psychoanalytic theory are only abstract and pale guides to the complex terrains of the human mind and heart. But, then, the woman’s accusation sent me back in time to my early professional training at Thalians Mental Health Center in Los Angeles, circa the early 1970s where I learned about many uses of theory beyond its simple function of organizing intellectual data. There, theory often served as a weapon in political and personal struggles. And I remembered Sharon, my first patient at Thalians, and how our relationship began in a theoretically dogmatic context.
Thalians, now defunct and shuttered, was then a part of the prestigious Cedar-Sinai Hospital complex. It was the domain of prominent Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles ego psychologists just as that particular school was beginning its descent from economic and cultural