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Dr. Sorenson's paper includes an important warning about the future of analytic training: Like liberal, inclusive, and adaptive Protestant churches, analytic institutes, under the influence of contemporary pluralism, could lose not only their unique distinctiveness but the power to compel significant adherence and commitment on the part of their members. At the same time, I think, the paper includes a kind of tendentious and specious reasoning about the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion that poses a danger of a different kind.
“Is pluralism the kiss of death for psychoanalysis?” There is, I think Sorenson agrees, no compelling alternative to pluralism, unless you embrace a fanatical and sectarian school of thought closed off to influence from other points of view. Pluralism is dictated not only by psychoanalytic politics in this “postapostolic age” but by postpositivistic notions of the relationship between theory and practice. But does this mean that, eventually, all institutes will become indistinguishable, striving to teach essentially, the same blend of theories, or that training will become dumbed down to a smorgasbord of perspectives? Worse, will the more fanatical schools of thought—“full of passionate intensity,” in Yeats's phrase—drive out those of us who “lack all conviction”? Sorenson uses the example of the Independent School in Great Britain—losing ground to the Kleinians, whose candidate-analysands are increasing in number.