From “Either/or” to “and”: The Analyst’s Use of Multiple Models in Clinical Work

Abstract

In our “post-pluralistic era” (Cooper 2015), analysts, perhaps particularly in North America, are exposed to a multiplicity of formal theories in their training and their reading; their clinical work often reflects ideas drawn from more than one of them. An aspect of this development is the analyst’s mental process as she draws on heterogeneous models when with the patient and when processing the events of the session afterward. A number of questions arise here: How does a new piece of clinical understanding, representing an alternative theoretical perspective—one that is not usually at the center of that analyst’s thinking—enter the mind of the working analyst? How can the analyst assess whether this is a useful piece of understanding? How can the new piece become assimilated in the analyst’s broader thinking? That is, how can the analyst’s practice influence her theory? (Canestri 2006).