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Readers of this journal well know the fratricidal and schismatic nature of many groups and organisations, not the least of which are psychoanalytic schools. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts are world-renowned for their internecine conflict that stretches further beyond the differences in most other professions. Psychoanalytic schools often demonstrate greater resemblance to religious sects or cults than to collegial scientific communities. Historically, psychoanalytic institutions seem to be in a constant process of divorcing and marrying, of splitting apart and coming together. From local institutes to the IPA, there have been seemingly incommensurable differences (e.g., Klein vs Freud, Lacan vs ego psychology).
Especially in the face of major opposition to psychoanalytic ideas, the last decades have seen more ‘coming together’, or at least attempts to do so. A significant milestone along this path was Robert Wallerstein's Presidential Address to the IPA in, ‘One psychoanalysis or many’ (1988), which argued for a pluralistic and diverse acceptance of the diversity of psychoanalyses, while at the same time arguing that there is only one discipline of psychoanalysis in its clinical practice, wrestling with interactional psychodynamic techniques of transference and resistance uncovering unconscious aspects of behaviour. Soon afterwards, Wallerstein elaborated a ‘common ground’ to such techniques, maintaining that ‘the commonality of our clinical approach to the phenomena of the “present unconscious” within the framework of our shared “clinical theory” transcends both our individual differences as unique people and the conceptual differences of our theoretical explanatory frameworks, and brings us together as identifiably all psychoanalysts doing the common work of psychoanalysis' (1990, p. 19). But was this a case of hope triumphing over science? André Green labelled Wallerstein's approach an ‘illusion’ and wondered if the different approaches in psychoanalysis even a