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“[W]e have ever more reasons to open our tent flaps, and become a welcoming neighborhood. … Psychoanalysis has so much to offer our fragile, burning world, but we remain trapped in our … sectarian wars, more concerned to view ourselves as superior to others than [dedicated to] our common project of healing. —Orange, 2015
While reading Bresler and Starr’s (2015) edited book about integrating into relational psychoanalysis various methodologies from the cognitive, behavioral, and bodily based psychotherapies, I could almost imagine the book’s 19 authors as “boots on the ground,” fighting on behalf of Orange’s (2015) plea for opening the tent flaps of psychoanalysis.
In Chapter 2 of this book, Safran and Messer propose an ideal stance for psychology practitioners, a stance they call “engaged fallibilistic pluralism” (p. 29) to which they add contextualism as well. They recommend this stance, which is paradoxically both skeptical and embracing as part of their postmodern critique of psychotherapy integration. But
theirs is a critique which (to my mind) reads almost as apologia. These authors walk a fine line in their effort to sustain a dialectical tension between acceptance and rejection of difference among psychoanalytic and nonanalytic treatments while suggesting that due to the ever-expanding array of alternate therapies in the 21st century, the central challenge for psychoanalysts and nonanalytic psychotherapists alike will be to work gracefully in the face of undeniable ambiguity and, I would add, dizzying choices.
As I see it, the ambiguity proliferates because both within and circling psychoanalysis there are multiple simultaneous integration projects currently underway, which include:
Integrational attempts within psychoanalysis—efforts to reach out and translate across contemporary theories toward a common understanding, which, as we undertake these efforts, we would do well to remind ourselves of Safran and Messer’s warning that any translation across theorie