Chasing infinity: Why clinical psychoanalysis' future lies in pluralism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Part of an ongoing political and scholarly effort to move the psychoanalytic project towards greater cohesiveness, the author proposes a standard method, borrowing the phrase from physics, for a structured, eclectic clinical pluralism. She [or he] uses psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments, as well as considerations of patients’ personal idiosyncrasies, to conclude that achieving one, over-arching metapsychology will prove impossible. In other words, and despite their ardent efforts, psychoanalytic theorists, including Freud (1895/1991), Rangell (1975, 2006), Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), Wallerstein (1988, 1990, 2002, 2005, 2013), and others, failed to create models accounting for the dynamically interacting variables creating human subjectivity. Their struggles to bridge psychoanalytic theories of mind and method also fell short. As a result, the author suggests, clinical psychoanalysis’ ultimate fate lies in organizing what Wallerstein (2005) called the “common ground” (p. 626) into methodology which invites psychoanalytic practitioners to mine the psychoanalytic opus for its “plethora of theoretical metaphors” (Wallerstein, 2013, p. 36), “controlling fictions” (Greenberg, 2015, p. 17), “useful untruths” (Lament,020, p. 196), or “regional dialects” (Fulgencio, 2020, p. 15). Cohesively applying a pluralistically based metapsychology to guide clinical processes, rather than provide maps of the mind, offers much-needed unity to psychoanalysis’ applied wing.