ABSTRACT
This chapter recognizes the need to be open to thinking about the views of those who may have a different perspective. The very practice of analysis flies in the face of orthodoxies and fundamentalist thinking, yet clearly it can become dominated by certainties itself. For instance, within analytic institutions there has been a great deal of psychoanalytic orthodoxy, with each theoretical group having its own leaders and disciples, impeding the processes of creative debate. Psychoanalytic theory can also be used this way when patients bring “foreign” experiences into the consulting room; it functions as a form of protection to the analyst whose own normative experiences are put to the test. In these cases, it is enormously important for the analyst to be discovered as someone who might be able to think about his or her own restricted experience without using psychoanalytic theory defensively, as a psychic retreat.
