Conversation with a Truth Seeker

There is no success like failure

And failure is no success at all

I gladly accept the invitation of the editor of this journal to respond to (a prepublished version of) Peter Rudnytsky's ‘constructive critique’ of my introductory essay to Wilhelm Stekel's ‘On the History of the Analytical Movement’ (Bos 2005).

I put forward in that paper, as elsewhere, the proposition that one way to understand Stekel's position within psychoanalysis is to focus on marginalization and self-marginalizing dimensions in his work. The Stekel-Freud relationship was an ambiguous one, I argued, and the former's historic narrative is both a reflection of as well as an instrument in this relationship: it expresses a demand to be acknowledged as a loyal follower on the one hand, while, on the other, the author claims the right to be considered independent. In a paper in History of Psychology (Bos 2003) I proposed the term ‘dialectic antagonism’ to characterize the relationship between Freud and Stekel, arguing that both the marginal as well as the ‘marginalizer’ may profit from a marginalizing discursive dynamic. In a recent paper co-authored with Dave Park and Petteri Pietikainen (Bos et al. 2005), we further develop the theme of marginality within psychoanalysis, arguing that constructive and optimal marginality continue to play an important constitutive role in psychoanalysis.

Rudnytsky's main argument in his paper ‘Rescuing psychoanalysis from Freud’ is, I believe, that I have got it all wrong, and that Stekel together with Ferenczi and Jung should be considered the first true guardians of truth (a ‘common project’) - hence the title of his essay. Self-marginality, he writes, is nonsense, my commentary on Stekel misguided in the extreme and my position - all too prevalent in the post-modernist era - fortunately refuted by everything psychoanalysis has to teach us both in theory and in practice.