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All of us owe a great debt to Jay Greenberg and his colleague Stephen Mitchell for the education they have given us in their joint and respective books. Perhaps because of the very richness of this education, this review, critique, and development of analytic theories brought forcibly to my mind related questions: What is the effect of these many ideas, representations, and rerepresentations of ideas on our relationships with each other and with the patients? How do they affect our capacity to get through to one another? Are we inflating the importance of theory as we once did our treatment expectations? Are there other ways we might go about the work without losing the dignity and self-consciousness so admirable in psychoanalysis?
The histories of both medicine and psychology are replete with periods of theoretical inflation succeeded by returns to simpler questions.
Doctrinal disputes are common to every field of inquiry. My impression is they are fiercer in those areas where secure findings are most difficult to reach. I am told no field surpasses cosmology in the ferocity of its debates. There, as in psychoanalysis, large stretches of events can be only a little and occasionally sampled. Surely uncertainty drives the need to conclude, to find a resting point, however brief, from the confusion that prevails. And when we deal with often unique historical configurations, uncertainty can be impenetrable. We need both to find a path and to tolerate what may be not only uncertain but novel and emerging.