General Introduction

This issue of the Journal will be devoted to an exposition of the state of psychoanalytic theory today as I see it. This is ironically a minority view. While I have been actively associated with the psychoanalytic mainstream for half of this psychoanalytic century, the mainstream, while still called that, is no longer “main.”

When the question one theory or many was first posed to the psychoanalytic body at the Montreal International Psychoanalytic Congress in 1987, it was received as rhetorical, as speaker and audience joined in a celebratory mood to the only expected answer: many. Any view to the contrary seemed to have vanished or to remain invisible, or limited to isolated individuals.

While in the decade since then, pluralism and the eclectic view of the equal validity of all theories have thrived, I speak for the other half of the question asked, for the answer: one. I further believe that there is a coalescence of individuals, increasingly critical of the scientific core of the present stance, who miss this opposite view and hope for its return. I also believe that this will be the direction of the future. Ultimately it will not be a question of differentiating one psychoanalytic theory from other equal, alternative ones, but of differentiating a psychoanalytic theory from nonpsychoanalytic ones.

I will refer briefly in a historical overview to previous periods of competing systems, beginning promptly during the pioneer phase at the turn of the century, with Jung, Adler, Rank, and Ferenczi, each differing in his own way from Freud's beginning new science, through the cultural and interpersonal theoretical divisions of Sullivan, Horney, Fromm, and Thompson of the 1920s to 1940s, and past the more official organizational “splits” of the 1950s, which centered around the contrasting views of psychoanalysis of Franz Alexander and Otto Fenichel. Against these as background, I date the onset of the current