Specificity Theory: Conceptualizing a Personal and Professional Quest for Therapeutic Possibility

Abstract

The author articulates his most recent formulation of Specificity Theory. He offers personal and professional influences that have contributed to his apprehension of psychoanalytic therapeutic process depicted by this theory. Specificity Theory arises from a psychoanalytic tradition that prioritizes therapeutic efficacy. This tradition began with Ferenczi and unfolded in the clinical perspectives of Balint, Alexander, Winnicott, Bion, and Kohut. Contemporary findings in ancillary fields, such as the infant research of Sander and Tronick, the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the neurobiological theories of brain development and function offered by Gerald Edelman, are confirmatory of the process of understanding emergent uniqueness that Specificity Theory describes. Specificity Theory holds that therapeutic effectiveness is a function of the specific capability for requisite responsiveness of a particular analytic dyad. Specificity Theory is a process theory that recognizes that an analyst's formal psychoanalytic structure theory is only one constituent of that analyst's unique capacity to respond optimally to his particular patient.