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In the last score of years, psychoanalysis has been caught up in a swirl of new theoretical options, prompted for the most part by dissatisfaction or uneasiness about the scientific status of the received metapsychology. Traditional theory had it that psychoanalysis was a natural science and therefore followed the methods and techniques of theory construction of a natural scientific methodology. The revolt against the natural-science model brought into question both the impersonal mechanistic quality of the natural-science account (Schafer, 1976) and the unscientific contamination of the account by metaphorical and anthropomorphized concepts (Grossman & Simon, 1969; Wurmser, 1977). Alternative theories substituted a view of psychoanalysis as a humanistic discipline, based on personal data that were impregnated with meaning and followed the model of various humanistic disciplines (Meissner, 1985). Thus psychoanalysis was seen as a linguistic discipline (Lacan, 1968, 1977; Ricoeur, 1970; Edelson, 1975), as a form of historical knowledge (Novey, 1968; Schafer, 1978, 1983; Wallace, 1985), or as a more specifically experiential or existential enterprise (Kohut, 1971, 1977). The emphasis on personal relationships and interpersonal influence of the object relations approach would bring it under the latter category (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).
The tensions in this debate may ultimately be irresolvable.