The Search for Integration or How to Work as a Pluralist Psychoanalyst

Abstract

In my professional path, I strove for the integration of my identity as a psychiatrist and as a psychoanalyst, in the frame of pluralism, which exists in modern psychoanalysis. Having been trained in a Kleinian approach, I will explore the painful breach experienced during my parallel trainings as a psychoanalyst and as a dynamic psychiatrist. I worked for five years as a psychoanalyst and a researcher in Germany and was involved to a large extent with the psychoanalytic world, which increased my self-definition as a pluralist. On my return to Chile, I discovered the need for political changes in the psychoanalytic society and curricular modifications in my training institute to recover psychoanalysis from its academic isolation. Finally, I will analyze the extant connections between the ideology of pluralism in psychoanalysis and its application in clinics. I will show that the exploration of the inference processes of the psychoanalyst inside a session—the psychoanalyst's mind at work—demonstrates that the analyst in fact functions as an artisan thinker. This means that pluralism—that is, the use of more than one theoretical frame and of different levels of abstraction and explicitness—is the way the majority of psychoanalysts “naturally” work. What probably differs is the self-consciousness, scope, and rank of pluralism.