The Strawman Returneth

After renewing their charge that I set up a straw man in criticizing the mythological underpinnings of classical analysis, the Richards (1995), in their response to their respondents, continue relentlessly to caricature and misrepresent my views. They ask rhetorically whether I mean to include myself among theorists whose viewpoints are shaped by their own psychological histories, and whether I and my theories must therefore be products of an unempathic mother, as if such a simplistic formulation were the only one that could follow from the adopting of an intersubjective perspective. Had the Richards done their homework, they would know that Atwood and I (1993) have addressed the question of the personal, subjective origins of our theoretical ideas in some detail. Here I quote only the headlines:

We have proposed that every theory of personality universalizes the theorist's personal solution to the nuclear dilemmas and crises of his own life history. Clearly, this generalization, if valid, must also apply to

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us…. Others will perhaps more fully recognize the inevitably particularized scope of our vision en route to a still more general and encompassing point of view [pp. 189-190].

An important consequence of our studies of the psychological origins of theoretical frameworks is that they have had a profoundly relativizing impact on our view of psychoanalytic theories, including our own. This view may be characterized philosophically as a form of “fallibilism” (Orange, 1995), an attitude that recognizes that what we know is always particularized by our personal subjectivities and that we should therefore hold our theories lightly, rather than tightly as the Richards do.

The Richards imply that my viewpoint does not attend to the personal unconscious, even though I have written extensively on that subject (see, for example, Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, chapter 2), and they wrongly attribute to me the absurd belief that “the child is … a tabula rasa [and that] the caregiver