ABSTRACT
What has been called the “Relational turn” or the “post-modern turn” has, since the 1980s, effectively shifted prevailing psychoanalytic thinking in the United States away from the theretofore dominant view that psychoanalysis is an objective science. How any given psychoanalyst thinks, and what he or she believes, is inherently a function of the subjectivity of that unique individual. From this perspective, a belief in psychoanalysis’ objectivity can be just as subjective as the belief that this is impossible. Each major psychoanalytic tradition or school has core theoretical suppositions about both the nature of human development and what constitutes an ideal clinical process. And while it is commonly assumed that most adherents of a given school subscribe to its beliefs and ideals, I suggest in this paper that each psychoanalyst engages with patients in ways that reflect as much the person of that analyst as membership in any of these particular schools of thought. In the negative this may be seen as anarchy, and in the positive, as creativity. Either way, I see this as inevitable and characterizing what Renik (1993) has called “the irreducible subjectivity” of analytic theorizing and of clinical process.
