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The Common Ground of Psychoanalysis is, paradoxically, about the uncommon ground in psychoanalysis. It concerns Robert Wallerstein's valiant efforts to find some measure of “common ground” in what he refers to as “our psychoanalytic pluralism.” By this he means the increasing diversity of theoretical perspectives offered by the competing schools of psychoanalysis.
The book is divided into three parts: Part I, Psychoanalytic Pluralism, contains two comprehensive and setting-the-stage essays on “The Context of the Issue” and “One Psychoanalysis or Many?” by Wallerstein. In the first essay he aptly defines the relevant issues: “We now live, in America and all over, in a world of self-conscious psychoanalytic diversity, or pluralism…. This is now everywhere an accepted part of our psychoanalytic scientific life, with varying degrees of comfort or disquiet” (p. 22). As an example of this diversity he cites Schafer's (1985) proposition that Freud's original concept of “wild analysis” has outlived its once clear meaning and usefulness, “for what is now one person's proper analysis is another's wild analysis” (p. 26).
In “One Psychoanalysis or Many?” he sums up his position succinctly:
I see them [i.e., the pluralism of current psychoanalytic theories—American ego psychology, Kleinian, object-relational, self psychology, Lacanians, etc.], at least at this stage of our historic developmental dynamic, as primarily metaphors…or symbolisms which we use to give a sense of coherence and closure to our psychological understandings and therefore to our psychoanalytic interventions. They are therefore the metaphors that we live by, that are our pluralistic psychoanalytic articles of faith, and that I feel in our current developmental stage to be essentially beyond the realm of empirical study and scientific process. (p. 56; italics added)
In concluding this first section, Wallerstein notes that his current vision of psychoanalysis includes both a unitary clinical theory that is empirica