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Most analysts would agree that we confront the critical task of finding a methodology that can, over time, help us select those theories and techniques that are most efficacious in allowing us to understand our patients' mental functioning, with the goal of helping them toward more gratifying and effective lives. Psychoanalytic pluralism, a necessary and welcome stage in the developing history of psychoanalysis has, not unexpectedly, evolved into a multiplicity of opposing theoretical and technical dogmatisms. What we lack are the means to arrive at decisions concerning the superiority of one or another of these views. This dilemma dates back to the earliest days of psychoanalysis, but today we lack the authority of a Sigmund Freud to settle our disputes. Dale Boesky, author of Psychoanalytic Disagreements in Context, is appalled—as am I—by the continued “absence of a con-sensually accepted methodology for the justification of our interpretations” (p. 202).
In this volume, Boesky describes his attempt to bring good sense to many of our disputes by use of the concept of contextualization. Because his argument is complex, I will quote him extensively in this review. The ambitious intent of this volume is to provide
… a method of contextualization that could reliably demonstrate the inferential processes by which the analyst arrives at conjectures about the disguised meanings of the patient's associations. … This is the location of many of our incoherent disagreements. … [Further] all meaning is relative to some context and no universal meanings exist outside of context. … Our methodology of contextualization remains obscure and controversial. The neglect of this problem is all the more remarkable because it has always been, and remains, the Achilles heel of psychoanalysis. [pp. xi-xii]