Commentary

Rangell's central proposal is that psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge is, in itself, an evolving, unitary, coherent, composite theory, whereas contemporary psychoanalytic culture makes it out to be a collection of alternative, inconsistent, but equally viable theories. I am in basic agreement with his view. We already have his clear historical and discursive elucidation of the issues. I propose to focus more closely on a few of them.

Theoretical plurality is based, as Rangell says, on political and administrative convenience and not on established scientific validity. But what are the sources of this political convenience and administrative convenience? Here are some possibilities: egalitarianism, peace at any price, a disillusionment about the clinical testability of psychoanalytic theories.

Egalitarianism is a principle of democratic social organizations from professional societies to nation states where fundamental rights are concerned, including opportunity. But genes do not distribute endowments according to a principle of equality and very short men do not have the same opportunity to become professional basketball players as do very tall men. Egalitarian principles do not apply to the choice of theories in science any more than they apply to the choice of basketball players. That theory will carry the day which is observationally or experimentally verified. Its competitors will be discarded.

But the situation is not so simple. The history of psychoanalytic theory is not akin to that of the theory of evolution, for example, in which Darwin's observations validated natural selection and rendered its Lamarckian competitor de trap but left the theory incomplete until Mendel discovered genetic mutations. The history of