Some Case Material Bearing on the Question of a Unitary Psychoanalytic Theory

I shall present elements from the analysis of a highly intelligent, gifted, good-looking, tall, slender woman who was 30 years old when she began her analysis. The parts of the analysis are selected for their relevance to the question: is psychoanalysis a consistent, integrated theory or is it a collection of disconnected and, in some cases, even contradictory theories? I do not agree with those who take theories to be metaphors that entitle us to exercise personal preference in their choice. Theories describe or fail to describe what is real; about what is real we have no right of choice. The real is given. Consequently, I also hold that clinical observations can and must decide which, if any, of the current psychoanalytic theories describe and which fail to describe psychic reality. To describe, as I am using the word here, also includes to explain and to understand.

Ms. B was a litigation lawyer, a profession for which she had outstanding intellectual and verbal gifts that she carried with a graceful unpretentiousness. She was the eldest of three daughters of postwar European immigrants. Her father was a taciturn steel worker of minimal education, a reliable but detached and remote breadwinner for his family. The mother was a woman with social ambitions from a prosperous family that had suffered during the war and its aftermath. Her much loved and idealized elder brother, an accomplished athlete and university educated budding political leader, had died in a German concentration camp because of his opposition to the Nazis. The