The Psychoanalytic Dictionary: A Position Paper On Diversity and Its Unifiers

Abstract

An attempt is made to create a conceptual housing for an increasingly common stance among clinicians who willingly draw from diverse theories as they seem applicable to the immediate clinical moment. The working clinician generally does this without regard to questions of eclectic contradiction or of whether concepts can be extricated from the theories in which they are embedded. The metaphor of a psychoanalytic dictionary is used to create this conceptual housing. Within this metaphor, a psychoanalytic alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar are defined, as well as a set of core assumptions that gives some shape to the boundaries of the psychoanalytic language. Diversity is located in the preferred alphabets and vocabularies of varied psychoanalysts, and unifiers are found in the grammar and core assumptions of the language. Questions regarding internally inconsistent eclecticism and extricability are discussed. The integrative concepts chosen here (among the many that are possible)—concepts defining a shared view of how mind works— are found in such familiar ideas as displacement, condensation, overdetermination, and multiple function.

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