Chapter 13 Psychoanalysts' Theories

The title of this contribution, ‘Psychoanalysts’ theories’, rather than the more familiar ‘Psychoanalytic theories’, is deliberate. Psychoanalytic theories are found in books, journals and libraries, and as part of the scholarly dialogue of that small group of psychoanalysts who generate formal theories and speak and write about them. These theories are complicated, confusing and abstract. They are also represented, although not always with great precision or accuracy, in the minds of all working psychoanalysts, including that majority who would never consider writing a paper on psychoanalytic theory, where they contribute to what I am calling ‘psychoanalysts’ theories’. My focus is on these latter theories, which are situated in the minds of practising psychoanalysts rather than in books or journal articles, and which therefore make a difference to patients. I will discuss their history, their subject matter and their several functions. As psychoanalysts, we should anticipate that these latent or implicit theories might be quite different from the manifest public ones; that elegance, logic or consistency might turn out to be only minor virtues in this kind of theory; and that psychoanalysts not only might not know what their implicit theories are, but also might argue vehemently that they are actually something quite different.

I believe that Joseph Sandler (1983) was addressing this same subject, although reaching a different conclusion, when he wrote:

The fledgling psychoanalyst will bring with him into his consulting room what he has learned from his own analyst, from his supervisors and other teachers, and from his reading. He will carry in his head the theoretical and clinical propositions that he has gathered from these various sources, and these propositions will be, for the most part, the official, standard or public ones. The human mind being what it is, he will continue to underestimate the discrepancies and incongruities in the public theories