ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the psychoanalytic project attempts to improve on historiography, as understood by R. G. Collingwood and G. W. F. Hegel, by articulating the current unacknowledged private theories of analysts that are expressed implicitly in their clinical work but are not recognised and articulated explicitly in their publications. Contradictions may occur in the plurality of public theories as well, as in certain of the elements of Kleinian theory as compared with Freudian theory, self-psychology, relational psychoanalysis, etc. In principle, the variations can run from the contradictory to the consistent, but nevertheless remain unacknowledged, as such, in the analyst’s published theoretical reflections. Theoretical pluralism derives from initially private ideas that are in contradiction with public theories because if these ideas are fundamental enough, they can become the underlying assumptions of a new coherent public theory as its implications are progressively worked out.
