The Relation of Theory to Technique

The increasing awareness and acknowledgment of our psychoanalytical theoretical diversity, or pluralism as we have come to call it, that has marked recent decades, has brought to the fore the pressing technical issue of the consequences of this theoretical pluralism for our shared clinical enterprise as practicing psychoanalysts, an issue around which our discipline has to this point failed to achieve consensus. The Richards belong to those analysts who feel that technique follows theory, that theoretical change or advance, if it is consequential to any extent, necessarily leads to altered technique. Their whole paper, beginning with a clinical vignette, and going on to discuss in turn modern-day ego psychological theory (which they call “modern conflict theory”), Kohut's self psychology, what they call relational and intersubjective psychoanalysis, modern Kleinian theory, and lastly, American object relations theory, is an effort to buttress that viewpoint. Close to explicit in that viewpoint is the conviction that one's own chosen theoretical position—and the Richards' position is, of course, modern conflict theory with which they associate a cluster of distinguished and familiar names, all American incidentally—is the most fruitful, the most comprehensive in an explanatory sense, and the most effective in a therapeutic sense.

This same overall topic has also become central to my own theoretical and clinical interests, though I have approached it from a different starting point and have emerged with a contrary position on the relation of theory to technique, or more precisely on how consequential theory is, in fact, for technique. My own starting point in this inquiry was in the development of two interlocking themes in my plenary addresses to the International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in Montreal in 1987 (Wallerstein, 1988) and to the following Congress in Rome in 1989 (Wallerstein, 1990). These two