ABSTRACT
Hans Loewald once wrote that “Splitting, duality, and multiplicity make possible a conscire, a knowing together”. This chapter explores in a somewhat meandering fashion the implications of the rigorous multiplicity and how we might mark progress in the field without seeking to eliminate it—indeed, how the ethics of Loewald’s conscire might be applicable not only to clinical practice but also to the field itself. The multiple dimensions of psychoanalysis are like the combined species of the mythic beast, an inconceivable anomaly. The principles proposed by A. Adler and C. Jung respectively were thus judged by S. Freud to be “retrograde movements away from psychoanalysis”. As a clinical science, the truth value of psychoanalysis is determined by its effects as a practice, not just by its elegance and rigor as a theory. The conceptual and organizational pluralism of psychoanalysis poses a problem regarding what might be called the core identity of the field.
