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Psychoanalysis is beset with conflicts about differing theoretical and clinical approaches. Classical Freudians, Ferenczian relationists, Kohutian self-psychologists, intersubjectivists, Kleinians, Kernbergian object relationists, Sullivanian interpersonalists, and Spotnitizian modernists all passionately believe they have a theoretically and clinically superior therapeutic model. But does one model do a better job explaining the dynamic unconscious? Does one model offer a clinical approach superior to others? This question is especially important to analysts who believe that interpretation is central to cure because providing the correct interpretation—the most accurate explanation of the patient's unconscious—provides the basis for therapeutic change. In the past century psychoanalysts have invested enormous energy in disagreeing, and our literature is filled with arguments for the superiority of each model. But because there is no method for close comparison of different models at a clinical level, our debates are characterized by authors talking past each other, ultimately inhibiting our development of clinical theory. Drawing on the hermeneutic tradition, Dale Boesky articulates a method of contextualization to resolve some of these enduring polemical disputes.
In this book Boesky offers a methodology to examine the context out of which an analyst's inferential process emerges. Ideally, Boesky (2005) would like to “develop a consensually accepted canon of rules of evidence for deriving inferences from [a patient's] associations” (p. 835). How does the analyst make meaning out of what he observes, and how does he use that understanding to form interventions? “Context” is a meaningful coherence created through the connection, or weaving together, of bits of information. Context begins when