Letters from Readers

To The Editor

I am responding to the letter of Drs. Stolorow and Atwood (The Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 67, No. 4, Winter 1980-81) which suggested that my earlier review of their book, Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (The Psychoanalytic Review, 1980, 67: 147-149), contained “glaring misrepresentations of [their] aims and viewpoints.” What they propose was that I misunderstood, misread, or distorted their views. Their primary complaints are that I stated that the thesis of their book was aimed at discrediting (i.e., raising serious questions about the validity of) psychoanalytic theories by applying to them psychobiographical methodology, and that in their viewpoint they appeared to me to have abandoned a “scientific” approach to theory-building. Their answer to these criticisms is to quote extensively from the section of their book headed, “Subjectivity and Validity” (pp. 21-23), the quotes ostensibly demonstrating unequivocally that their aims are quite the opposite of those I had attributed to them. Apparently, the rest of my review did not meet with the same intensity of critical reaction.

I believe that I have indeed understood Stolorow and Atwood correctly from the start, and that the specific quotes in their letter and the book as a whole represent those aims as I have described them.

The authors quite clearly call attention in the first section of their book to the problem of assessing theories of personality on the basis of their origins versus criteria which specifically exclude the person of the theorist, his social and intellectual background, etc. The latter set of evaluative criteria tend to be identical with those applicable in the natural sciences, and include such items as internal consistency between parts of the theoretical structure; specified standards by which observations may be assessed and admitted as relevant data; rules of correspondence between the realm of data (observation) and theoretical statements referable to hypot