Polarities and Amalgams: Analytic Dyads and the Individuals within Them

In this paper I will discuss briefly a number of controversial polarities as they exist in psychoanalysis today: positivism versus social constructivism, one-person psychology versus two-person psychology, self-regulation versus mutual regulation. I think of these latter poles (one-person versus two-person, self-regulation versus mutual regulation) as linked rings dependent on each other and on the first broad debate (positivism and social constructivism). The broad debate, I believe, represents differing philosophical positions that underlie contemporary psychoanalytic theories.1 A clinical vignette with an emphasis on clinical psychoanalysis will illuminate a more integrated use of these polarities.

In a prior paper (Silverman, 1994), I described the first broad polarity as reflecting a positivist, empiricist philosophical position in contrast to a social-constructivist, hermeneutic view. The former represents the tradition ushered in from at least Descartes (the modern scientific era) with an emphasis on a search for truth, to seek for universal postulates and knowledge based on scientific principles including experimental and objective testing of theory, utilization of logical relationships, mathematical language, and concern with issues of reliability and validity. Using such scientific tools, positivists believe, one can obtain an increasing accurate picture of reality. Freud's positivistic learnings were a reflection of his then modern, nineteenth-century, enlightened perspective. He wished to dispel the demons and phantoms that beset his contemporaries when they struggled to understand symptomatic behavior and ultimately, the human condition. He hoped to subject the irrational to scrupulous study and discover universal truths about humankind. As a student of Ernst Brücke, Freud was interested in uncovering the physicalchemical