Open Door Review

interest disappeared. Admittedly the base rates are not very high but they have been the same for quite some while. The surprising results emerged when we looked at the number of times that an article in the International Journal was likely to be referred to in psychoanalytic journals. It seems that this is where the declining interest in psychoanalysis originates. With other psychoanalysts! What does this imply? If these observations are to be believed, the clear implication is that we no longer take sufficient notice of each others’ publications to want to refer to them in our papers. We are no longer accumulating knowledge – but rather (to exaggerate the point somewhat) we are all developing the discipline in our own individual directions, no doubt building on the classics, but by and large and increasingly, ignoring contemporary contributions. These are statistical trends and I am sure that they could be interpreted in a number of ways. It is likely that psychoanalysis is not the only discipline manifesting this trend and while we adjusted the figures for the overall trend for recent articles to be less frequently cited, there may be certain disciplines including psychoanalysis which are characterised by this same trend. 3 It is possible that the decline is specific to the IJPA and JAPA and is in fact an artefact of the emergence and increasing prominence of new journals over the historical period which the study covered. In this case the declining trend would merely index the declining market share of the ‘classical journals’. However, the absolute reduction in citations remains an important observation, even if the suggestion is that one cause of the fragmentation may be the great multiplication of channels of publication. By contrast it may be that this phenomenon is specific to English language journals and a similar effect could not be demonstrated in the Spanish, French or German literature. More worryingly, it could be that more recent articles are genuinely of poorer quality; it could be that people simply do not read the journals. Surveys conducted by the American Psychological Association have shown that most psychologists in clinical practice read less than one new article per year. I fear that the most likely explanation is that this phenomenon signals a major epistemological problem of conceptual fragmentation and the loss of an organising paradigm. ;91<$72($)*6!2*&!1)66$3<0!72B606! It seems fairly evident that fewer and fewer English publications achieve sufficient acclaim to merit citation. The consequence is obvious. We might have experienced difficulties in professional communications up till now (e.g. Wallerstein, 1992), but such difficulties are negligible compared to the problems we shall be facing in a few years time. It could be argued that the so-called major psychoanalytic schools which have emerged to organise our discipline over the last half of the 20 th century are breaking down. Ego psychologists are no longer ego-psychologists, Winnicottians are no longer just Winnicottian, self-psychologists have fragmented, Kleinian-Bionians have less and less in common beyond these two giants of the field, Anna Freudians were probably an improbable grouping even during her lifetime, and inter-personalists never had a coherent theme beyond the citation of Harry Stack-Sullivan. From this point of view Victoria Hamilton’s book The Analyst’s Pre-conscious , exploring in depth the conceptual frameworks of over 80 eminent psychoanalytic practitioners, makes sobering reading (Hamilton, 1996). This fragmentation and confusing absence of shared assumptions is what spells, to me, the inevitable demise of psychoanalysis – more than any of the external challenges that we face. In the absence of a common language, we are forced to occupy increasingly smaller intellectual territory. Increasing fragmentation of the psychoanalytic knowledge base has, after all, been a feature of psychoanalysis from its very inception. Ultimately, we shall all be on our own, fiercely protecting our personal psychoanalytic patch. So, what is responsible for the tendency towards theoretical entropy in psychoanalysis? Roger Perron (2001), in his incisive and erudite analysis of epistemology in the 2nd edition of the ODR, draws attention to this in his discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of

3 Dr Stephen Ellman (personal communication) mentioned a similar study undertaken by him and his colleagues in the field of neuroscience where very similar declining trends were observed.

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