Response to Alfred Plaut's Comment

I am glad to have a chance to comment on Fred Plaut's interesting response to my article. He makes many points which deserve reply, but to keep things brief I shall confine myself to clarifying one misapprehension.

In his third paragraph, Dr Plaut suggests that I imply that Jung's ‘fear of analytic understanding’ is shared by his followers. This was certainly not my intention. On the contrary, my concern with the psychopathology of Freud/Jung is because I feel that we are all made poorer as a result of that personal rift, and we need to understand it in order to minimize the damage it can continue to do to trainees and to analysands more generally. Dr Plaut tells us that he himself went into psychoanalysis, though without ‘leaving the (Jungian) fold’; that was no doubt expensive enough; I did a second training, which also had its expenses. But I did it because I wanted clear access to the developments which I find most exciting, those of object-relations theory, which post-date the Freud/Jung split, but took place in the Freudian camp.

As Dr Plaut rightly says, many Jungian analysts have made a similar move, though usually without ‘leaving the fold’. The analytic profession is in a paradoxical situation, in which ‘schools’ — Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, etc. — are perpetuated for professional and political reasons, long after our best thinking has moved on from the issues that created them. A ‘school’ has a proper scientific function: it is to develop the thought of an innovative thinker, and then to dissolve and contribute these developments back into the mainstream. Because the analytic traditions have institutionalized their splits in professional bodies, and cemented them in place with transferences to trainers, concepts used as shibboleths, etc, this healthy dissolution of schools never takes place, and we are all deprived; or we have to take extraordinary measures — additional trainings, additional analyses — to overcome our deprivation.