The current psychoanalytic dialogue: its counterpart in Renaissance philosophy

It is my premise that psychoanalysis is involved in a phase of metapsychological and technical debate typical during the course of intellectual history. In general, the more traditional school textually conceptualizes psychoanalysis as a natural, observational science involving subject-object duality, determinism, and causality, and tends to separate theory and practice, interspersing a force-energy metapsychology. The recent critics of traditional theory view psychoanalysis as closer to cultural science and art. They do not subscribe to a strict determinism and conceptualize that they work more within a field of free will. Their tendency to keep theory close to practice leads to more experience-colored, closer to the clinical, theoretical models. I have tried to provide some early evidence that, through mutual influence, a dialectic is rising above the heat of this debate, with each group incorporating some of the ideas of the other. At the same time, since all differences are not true polarities, and not all polarities can be reconciled, the possibility that psychoanalytic theory will necessarily reach a new level of synthesis must be looked upon with caution. It is hoped that a broad view of this theoretical struggle in psychoanalysis can be enriched by an awareness among its participants of the related counterparts in Western intellectual history.