You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Current wisdom has it that we live in a period of theoretical pluralism. By common consensus this has become the accepted ambience in the present psychoanalytic culture. In the official opening of the last International Congress in San Francisco, the Chairman, introducing the program for the week, stated both the fact and its motivation explicitly, “The main theme of this Congress was chosen to encourage pluralism as well as to stimulate the development of new ideas compared with the more classic ones” (Grinberg, , p. 1).
In this paper I present an alternate view of psychoanalytic theory and understanding that exists parallel to this dominant view. The theory I present and represent is a unitary theory of psychoanalysis, which embraces all sufficient and necessary ingredients into one total, composite psychoanalytic theory. Besides this being my personal orientation, I have found a definitive voice expressed in private for this opposite view, which is inhibited from public expression in today's psychoanalytic culture. The mainstream, though still called that, is no longer main, but is now the minority within a minority. Psychoanalysis is still a small and beleaguered group, an island within a larger land. But its core beliefs within its own boundaries are fragmented and shattered. In that fact, in my opinion, lies the most important of our problems, not in the sociology or the external political swirls at whose feet the onus is usually placed. The science of psychoanalysis is not as secure in its basic moorings as we would wish, or as it once was.