ABSTRACT
Most of the authors of the object relations school have certainly moved away from the classical, Freudian frame of reference, but this does not make them non-Freudians. The author believes that what characterizes British psychoanalysts above anything else is an extremely astute clinical sense, which surpasses a simple opposition between theoretical and clinical practice. Psychoanalysis itself militates against any possibility of a single theory that would be definitive, unitary, free from contradictions. This tendency helps to explain the theoretical differences between the diverse authors who belong to the British school. The contributions made by the Independent analysts emphasized the interrelations between the analysand's and the analyst's subjective experience. Like art, psychoanalysis is a discipline of contradictions: the task of the analyst, as much as of the patient, is to accept them. The revolution provoked by psychoanalysis has to do with the way in which it turned our own relationship to knowledge upside down, by revealing our libidinal involvement with knowledge.
