How We Institute Our Psychoanalytic Education: Reply to Commentaries

I appreciate the thoughtful and differing commentaries by Drs. Bass, Druck, and Eisold. The points on which they differ can be viewed as helpful examples of the various ways that nearly all analysts will likely respond to the issues I raise about structuring our associations to facilitate psychoanalytic education. Because the argument in my essay progressed across three points (the idealization of science, imagining institutes as religious denominations, structuring psychoanalytic education), I return to each of these now as a way to continue the dialogue that the commentaries invite.

Philosopher Nancey Murphy (1990, 1997) has noted how the beginning and ending of the modern period—which in philosophy lasted from roughly 1650 until 1950—punctuate two turning points in epistemology. The first, which inaugurated modernity in the mid-17th century, entailed a rejection of medieval notions authority, whether feudal or ecclesiastical, in favor of a foundationalism that sought to reconstruct knowledge so as to establish a secure foundation from which to know everything else. The second turn, which occurred in the middle of the 20th century and is still in progress, involves a rejection of modernity's foundationalism in favor of a more holist epistemology. The two epistemological shifts that occasioned