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Let me begin with an autobiographical reminiscence, one that concerns, appropriately, theory and its relation to practice. While I was writing my dissertation as a history graduate student at Columbia University, I also attended classes at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute. Although my status was that of a socalled special candidate, someone who was learning psychoanalytic theory solely for the purpose of applying it to scholarly research, the instruction I received was geared to the needs of the regular candidates, who were being trained to conduct psychoanalysis with patients. I have a vivid memory of the day in the basic theory course when we discussed Freud's transition from his topographical model, in which he divided the mind into conscious, preconscious and unconscious spaces, to his structural model, in which he postulated the relatively stable and persistent organizational entities of ego, id and superego. The shiftoccurred around 1920, by which time Freud had been spinning out psychoanalytic theory for over two decades. But, according to my teacher, Freud never went back to his earlier work to recast it in terms of the ego-id-superego triad; nor did he ever repudiate that earlier work, couched though it was in now-outmoded categories. Rather, within his corpus, the topographical and structural models simply coexisted.
After the requisite, joking reference to Freud's anal retentiveness, the teacher noted that this overlap posed not real problem to the practicing analyst; indeed it represented a resource. The analyst should, we were told, keep both models in free-floating and evenly hovering attention (that tool of the trade) and, when listening to a patient, interpret the material according to whichever model its own particular content evoked. Thus the teacher said that he personally relied more on the structural model in his daily practice, but-that there wefe circumstances in which he was glad to have the topographical model in his repertory, too, for it sometimes allowed him to make better sense of what the patient was telling him.
I cannot remember what my reaction to this methodological pronouncement was at the time, although I suspect I was surprised that anyone would admit unapologetically to such an informal, ad hoc deployment of theory. Over the years, however, as I became a practicing historian, I have from time to time...