Ways of Thinking about New Knowledge and Further Research from a Developmental Orientation

This essay centers on three points: (1) that multidisciplinary exchanges of ideas and research are essential to the clinical science of psychoanalysis, (2) that biological models of development have changed, and (3) that a “theoretical tension” exists —for while psychoanalysis has participated in a milieu of changing developmental models, it has not sufficiently acknowledged or made use of them in theory or practice.

Some authors have implied that it is inappropriate to regard psychoanalysis as a psychology or form of therapy based on biological principles of development (Gill, 1976; Schafer, 1976). In their view, psychoanalysis would be better off if it were divorced from biological models and considered a “pure psychology”. My view is quite different. I consider biological models essential for framing psychoanalytic knowledge. Further, I consider a developmental orientation especially helpful because it addresses areas where current psychoanalytic thinking can profit from current biological thinking, while it raises new research questions at disciplinary boundaries. In my view, the continued viability of psychoanalysis is strengthened by regarding it as a special form of developmental discipline, one which can embrace both humanism and contemporary biology. Other forms of psychotherapy, emergent or descendant, have neglected either one or the other. But it is not easy to embrace both domains, as is witnessed by the history of psychoanalysis, by the current struggles waged in the literature of metapsychology (Gill and Holzman, 1976), and by the tendency to see a humanistic art and a biological science in competitive relationship. There are extraordin