Dear colleagues,
Dr. Hogenson's answer and his comments to Dr. Luepnitz sound very attractive to me from a psychoanalytical point of view and invite me to keep on thinking on these issues.
Perhaps theories not only have the structure of phobias; many times they show a counter-phobic attitude, when we force ourselves to give an answer to questions whose obscurity or lack of evidence, makes us remember the child fears to darkness. For this reason we love comforting worldviews and it is so difficult for us to distinguish in our controversies how far our personal beliefs are really grounded in our clinical experience.
As Dr. Hogenson says, the great masters are those who achieved an acknowledged place in the primal scene of debates and those of us who descend from them do not have the same right to generate new ideas without being accused of dissidence or pathology. I think that these facts are part of what the theoreticians of debate that I mentioned in my article refer to as pragmatic conditions for the debate. A controversy is only possible if all the participants may on an equal footing aspire to search for truth. And I would like to return here to the conditions that enable the debate, that from the dialogue with Dr. Luepnitz I think it is centered in the question of how we support our psychoanalytic statements and especially our theoretical and clinical preferences in psychoanalysis.
This takes us to the premises of the argument that I mentioned in my article and that Dr. Luepnitz retook in her discussion regarding which are the points we are discussing about –the controversies in psychoanalysis- and especially to the second point: "to establish agreements regarding the means by which the disagreement can be settled".
Best regards,
Ricardo Bernardi