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Given the enormous breadth of psychoanalysis, it is inevitable that it finds itself in dialectical tension with other disciplines which also seek to answer the same fundamental questions about the nature of human existence. The encounters include fields as far-ranging as political science and neurophysiology. That psychoanalysis has been challenged by such diverse viewpoints is testimony to its comprehensiveness and explanatory force.
One of the more recent dialogues has been with a somewhat loosely knit field called infant research. The manner in which one proceeds with that dialogue and how it is resolved may be a function of how the questions are framed. For example, at psychoanalytic meetings the question may be formulated something like this:
“Psychoanalysis and infant research stem from two totally different data bases, the couch and the crib; they deal with two distinctly different realities, the subjective and the objective; they relate to two different time frames, the long-term retrospective and the short-term contemporaneous, and they have two different aims, therapeutic and scientific. The only question worth discussing is