ABSTRACT
It has been said there are two types of people—those who divide the world into two categories and those who do not. This tongue-in-cheek statement speaks to the truth of our all-too-human tendency to simplify the ambiguities of psychic life by splitting, resorting to either-or solutions, creating dualities, and privileging one side over the other. Speaking of gender polarization, Jane Gallop (1982) wrote, “all polar oppositions share the trait of taming the anxiety that specific differences provoke” (p. 93). Polarization, like splitting, is a way of managing anxiety. It is not inherently pathological, but a necessary step in development. Anxiety discourages thirdness, a perspective from which binary oppositions can be broken down or deconstructed. Psychoanalysis has been plagued by polarized thinking, which has shaped both the development of its theory and its clinical practice. We will review a variety of ways in which contemporary psychoanalysts have attempted to utilize a dialectical approach as a solution to polarization. We will trace this emphasis on dialectics to contemporary currents in postmodernism, deconstruction, feminism, and postcolonial studies, and show the relevance of these interdisciplinary connections for psychoanalysis, in order to pave the way for our later discussion of how psychoanalysis came to define itself in opposition to psychotherapy.
