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It has been asserted, perhaps not entirely seriously it is true, that the Enlightenment polymath Thomas Young was ‘the last man to know everything in the world’. In part this is a reflection of Young's prodigious achievements in many fields but it is a reflection too of the extent to which the breadth and depth of human knowledge has expanded enormously over the last two hundred years. One consequence of this expansion has been the way that fields of study have become increasingly differentiated and specialized as investigators adopt a progressively more narrow focus in order to concentrate adequately upon the object of their study. The danger, of course, is that a specialist in any one field becomes quite isolated from workers even in quite closely related fields. Some universities have attempted to compensate for this problem of isolated and separate development by setting up departments of interdisciplinary studies in order to facilitate communication, cross-fertilization and collaboration between workers in different fields, but in truth it is hard to think how this problem of specialization can be much mitigated or indeed that it will not get worse, as time goes on and knowledge accumulates.
In our own field, from the outset, both Freud and Jung sought collaborators and corroborators outside of the world of psychology and medicine and inevitably this enriched analysis but also generated acrimonious dispute, for example, in Freud's case with the anthropologist Malinowski. Currently the field of neuroscience has been turned to by many analysts looking to its potential for affording new perspectives upon analysis, but it controversially remains to be seen how this will be realized and in what ways it will ultimately affect analytic theory and especially clinical practice.
All of this makes for a very difficult situation. If we strive to both develop our field and become proficient within it we must become specialists but at the same time be open to other fields that