Introduction

To see in the day or in the year a symbol

Of the days of man and of his years,

To transmute the outrage of the years

Into a music, a murmur of voices and a symbol . . .

We all agree that as psychoanalysts we are working in a time of theoretical pluralism. We strive to understand whether we are awaiting the arrival of a new paradigm that will incorporate the best of current theoretical perspectives into a grand, inclusive theory (Kuhn 1962), or if a multiplicity of perspectives is itself the new paradigm, comparable, for example, to complementarity in quantum physics? ¹ This would seem, therefore, an appropriate time to consider whence theories have arisen in the past.

We are accustomed to viewing changes in psychoanalytic theory as arising from our work with patients. In Kuhnian fashion, we change or extend our theoretical perspectives when we find that existing theory cannot fit all the data we encounter in our work. Freud himself set the example for this approach as he changed his theory throughout his life, adjusting and reformulating to explain expanding clinical evidence. ²

An alternative perspective on how theoretical change arises is suggested by Robert Wallerstein (2014) in his recent essay on Erik Erikson. Wallerstein’s thesis is that, along with such objective data, we should also take into consideration the personal struggles of major theorists themselves as they work in and react to a particular sociocultural context: “great issues of a particular time and place, as experienced by sensitive and creative individuals who are working to resolve their inner conflicts within these contexts, could find solutions that transcend themselves and yield conceptualizations that transform the world” (p. 657). Wallerstein claims that Erikson’s internal struggles over his biological, ethnic, and religious identities were writ large in his theories about adolescents, theories that found a particular resonance with the youth movement and protests of the 1960s. Wallerstein’s essay asks us to consider if there is a serendipitous coming together of a gifted intellect engaged in personal self-definition during a period of sociocultural change.

The two papers in this section take up that question. Arnold Richards proposes that Freud’s insistence on psychoanalysis as a science was the resolution of his internal struggle, during a rising tide of anti-Semitism, to move beyond the rituals and customs of his father’s religion while maintaining a tie to his Jewishness, examined through the concept of Bildung. Richards’s thesis is that Freud, exploring his own loved and hated objects, fashioned a new scientific psychology out of the fragments from those internal conflicts. By invoking the writing of Ludwik Fleck (a precursor to and influence on Thomas Kuhn) as a framework for his argument, Richards focuses attention on the historical, sociocultural context of theory construction and its role in “the imbrication of the struggles of the one, with the path for the achievements of the many . . .” (Wallerstein 2014, p. 673).

In his paper, David Terman describes Heinz Kohut’s struggle to free himself from his close identification with Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, through a period of self-analysis following his mother’s death. Freeing himself from his mother’s paranoid worldview enabled him to articulate the early developmental responses we all need. Although not a focus of Terman’s thesis, readers can recall sociocultural resonances in America during the late 1970s and 1980s of self-definition, self-recognition, and self-presentation, which continue into the present (e.g., from Lasch’s “culture of narcissism” [1979] to Facebook and “selfies”).

In all three cases (Erkison, Freud, and Kohut), the personal struggles and intrapsychic conflicts are rooted in the dynamics of family: how to manage intergenerational identification with others while forging one’s own identity. These are the conflicts inherent in what Laplanche (2011) has felicitously termed “the fundamental anthropological situation” (p. 204): that is, the asymmetrical relation between adult and dependent infant. It is a fundamental insight from psychoanalysis that each of us struggles with our original parents—biological or otherwise—and thereafter with their later incarnations and avatars. In every life, ambivalence about lineage and inheritance generates conflicts that must be resolved. These authors claim that each of these three creative individuals was able to transcend the particularities of their own circumstances and raise that resolution to a new level of universality.

These papers ask us to consider the relationships among theory, theorist, and sociocultural historical period. Can a theory transcend the particularities—personal, historical, sociocultural—of its inception? Does the acceptance of that transcendence reflect or depend upon a match with a specific cultural zeitgeist such as the rise of twentieth-century modernism in the West, or the turbulent search for identity in 1960s youth and the subsequent decades of self-realization in America? These papers provide an opportunity for us to explore these larger questions through the lives of individuals who were able to find in their unique circumstances our universal struggles and conflicts. Their ability to articulate what they discovered through their own self-analysis has profoundly affected our understanding of both ourselves and others.