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.