THE LINK AND THE OTHER

Abstract

The author begins by drawing attention to the current crisis in psychoanalysis, in which, following the great initial discoveries, he considers a certain solipsistic trend inimical to the role of the other and of the acceptance of innovation this entails has come to hold sway. This situation can in his view be overcome by the introduction of new applications and practices, as in the past with the acceptance of Klein's ideas in the field of child analysis. Theory is in the author's opinion always the product of clinical practice in our field, a thesis he illustrates by an account of his own work with couples and families, where the patient is deemed to be not any one individual in the group but the group itself considered as a nexus of links. The implications and theoretical repercussions of this link-based conception are discussed at length and some novel terms are introduced--for example, the link between subjects, imposition, the social subject, the subject relationship and the multiple subject. Alienness and the 'other', and presence and absence, are shown to be important concepts and are distinguished from object relations. The author concludes with a reference to a new resistance, namely to linking, and its implications in relation both to personality and to phenomena such as ethnic and religious conflict.