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This article, written before Stephen Mitchell's death, draws on Mitchell's (1997) Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis to illustrate some common discursive strategies that tend to fracture analytic dialogue. Such strategies include marginalization of the past, the use of sharp polarities, excessively tight linkages between theory and technique, and argument from epistemology rather than clinical observation. The author suggests that the clinical situation is more complex than these positions imply, that the polarities are inherent in the work itself, and that theoretical differences do not necessarily define the work. He concludes with the hope that further dialogue, based on the description of what analysts observe themselves doing in their own clinical work, might begin to illuminate what they hold in common and what remains beyond integration.
At a recent gathering of psychoanalysts, Ronald Britton (1998), the contemporary British Kleinian, was asked if he listened carefully to other people's theories.