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ARTICLE HISTORY Received 20 September 2025; Accepted 6 November 2025
In his 1958 paper “On the nature and aims of psycho-analytical treatment,” Fairbairn wrote that psychoanalysis resolves itself in a struggle on the patient's part to pull the analytic relationship into the closed system of his neurosis and equal effort, on the analyst's part, to affect a breach in the system. This perspective, which finds a precursor in Strachey (1934) and resonances in Loewald (1960) and Mitchell (1996), gains a fresh articulation in Singletary and Rice's valuable paper. The authors argue that child development can lead to relatively closed or relatively open modes of functioning. Early adversity engenders an attitude of mistrust, in the former, and undermines the child's ability to accept love or care in the present. In the latter, by contrast, a responsive early environment sets the stage for flexibility and a comparative open-heartedness in one's capacity to experience and grow through later relationships.
The originality of Singletary and Rice's contribution lies, primarily, in the substantial empirical literature – and especially the neurological literature – that they have marshaled to support their position. They suggest that successful therapy might involve “epigenetic and neuroplastic changes in the oxytocin/vasopressin system which would allow the patient to give, receive and tolerate more love” (p. 28). While I am in no position to evaluate their claim, it can only help psychoanalysis – particularly in our current cultural milieu – to show skeptics that treatment, as we envision it, results a material outcome that one could, in theory, point to on a screen.
The risk, of course, is we might eschew (or fail to defend) the value of the clinical setting as its own context of inquiry and empirical validation. While the authors are in no way guilty of this misstep, it is worth noting, in this respect, that we do not find much clinical material in their paper. I suggest that, in