You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
One of the major issues confronting psychoanalysis today is the proliferation of models and theories, alternatively viewable as a productive free marketplace of ideas or a cacophony of the voices of erring souls. I want to thank Hanly, Kaplan, and Modell for their willingness to devote their time and thought to the examination of one multiple model (Pine, 1990). I find their critiques to be both thoroughgoing and challenging, and I shall respond to them at some length and in various ways. I shall restate at the outset that I personally find a multimodel view to be capable of enhancing a productive flexibility in our clinical work and in our general thinking, while simultaneously maintaining intellectual rigor.
What I shall do here is the following: I will begin with some general points of theory and of the strategies of theoretical argument that I believe are responsive to each of the foregoing papers as well as to the overall tone of the debate. Then I shall address the clinically focused titles of both my book and the 1991 symposium at New York University that addressed my book. Finally I shall select some among the many major arguments made in each of the three papers and respond to them in turn.
To begin, then, with issues regarding theory: