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IV. CONCLUSION: METHODOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY
Successive stages of the conceptual development of Liberman’s Theory of Communication, marked by correlation of traditional psychoanalytic concepts, assumed to underlie the clinically observable communicative dialogue, with terminology from communication theory, semiotics and linguistics, and the resultant highly individualized multidimensional diagnostic systematization, with implications for clinical process and technique, pose a set of methodological questions and controversies. Some of these controversies are relevant to many other areas of psychoanalytic research, whenever empirical precision, categorization and cross-fertilization with auxiliary fields are employed. Liberman has described his effort as a firm striving to demystify psychoanalysis and to extricate it from the tendency to become a cliché, a form of indoctrination, risks to which psychoanalysis may be disposed to by its peculiar nature and practice, the theoretical diversity it encompasses, and its relative isolation from the scientific-academic community. In order to avoid these pitfalls, David Liberman’s work seeks to reach for the singularity of each individual in unrestrictive respect for the diversity of the human condition. To this end, he directs his work towards fashioning answers to the following epistemological and methodological questions: - How to reconcile the counter objectives of a method that seeks to emphasize the singularity of each patient while at the same time having to systematize and construe abstract concepts, a necessity of each and every science? - How to establish a practice of psychoanalysis which is so finely tuned to subjectivities and singularities with the pressures of being tested by objective standards of evaluation that are more trustworthy than the subjective impressions of those that individually practice it? - How to bring together the wide-reaching diversity of psychoanalytic theories – a veritable Tower of Babel – under a common language, intelligible to all, without taking away from each individual psychoanalytic culture’s peculiar efficiency and richness? (Arbiser, 2014). Such epistemological and methodological issues and controversies have a wide applicability, across psychoanalytic regions, theoretical orientations and research areas. In various ways, they are applicable to Infant ‘Strange Situation’ research studies of Attachment by Mary Ainsworth et al. (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters and Wall, 1978); Beatrice Beebe’s Theory of Interaction (Beebe 2000), drawing on Bateson’s (1972) Ecological models, constructing a method of close video-monitoring of mother-infant and therapist dyads/triads; Neuropsychoanalytic studies (Balbernie, 2001; Shevrin et al. 2013); Otto Kernberg’s (2015) study on Neurological Correlates of Object Relations Theory; Leo Rangell’s (1971) Unconscious Decision Making Function, synthesizing Information Processing theories and psychoanalytic studies of the Unconscious Ego functioning; Matte Blanco’s (1959) conceptualizations of ‘Unconscious Logic’ and ‘Bi-Logic’, combining mathematical logic
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