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Psychoanalytic theory, despite its deficiencies, remains by far the most detailed map of the mind available to us. Even at this late date, as psychoanalysis moves into its second century, no other theory has attempted to explain or to contribute to our understanding of so many aspects of the human condition—motive and action, dreams and thoughts, normal and pathological behaviors, individual and group dynamics, the development of mind from infancy to old age, art, and literature, and much more.
The strengths and vitality of our theory have survived in another manner as well—in the continuous formation and transformation of so many of its original observations and constructs. The current controversies that seem to fragment and splinter psychoanalysts, one from the other, are not the weak signals of a dying theory, but rather vital signs of its robust health, its struggle toward ever more complex understanding of the human condition.
Although there may be those among us that would lament the loss of the grand unified theory of history, in our time, we are fated to come to terms with modern theoretical pluralism—with its varieties of classical, ego psychological, object relational, interpersonal, self-psychological, and perhaps other versions of psychoanalytic theory that have yet to emerge, competing for our attention.
Because it appears to be in the very nature of psychoanalytic theories of mind to be unable to marshal any persuasive arguments (let alone any research data), that would help us to decide in favor of one or another of these approaches, and since many of these theories, moreover, are dependent or interdependent on each other (so that even proponents of Freudian theory, for example, like Win-nicott, or Mahler, may be claimed as the father or mother of relational