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The prospect of responding to this extensive critique of my book is quite daunting. Bachant and Richards find so many problems on so many different levels, I thought at first that it would take another book to clarify my positions or to correct them. (Most important, I had to decide how serious a flaw it was to be a “dichotomizer,” which sounds to me like the title of a sinister movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.) As I reflected further on their arguments, however, I began to realize that underlying all the issues they raise is a problem in the way they read or, I should say, misread my work. Their kind of misreading is quite representative of the response of many analysts who think in traditional categories about current developments in analytic theorizing and practice. So it seems important to try to understand the difficulties they have in their encounter with postclassical theorizing like mine.
My discussion has two parts. First, I sketch out the methodology of their criticism and give some examples of the way in which it leads them to miss or misunderstand my ideas. Second, I discuss the more general and fundamental political issue that separates their position from mine and the implications of those positions for our very different readings of the history of psychoanalytic ideas and the current state of classical Freudian thought.
Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis was never intended, in itself, as a comprehensive theory of anything, much less as a complete alternative to classical Freudian theory. As I stated explicitly, I was offering an approach, suggesting ways in which different relational traditions might be integrated, pointing the direction in which things might profitably move. Bachant and Richards pick specific issues that I in no way claimed to be