Truth or What Matters: Commentary on Paper by Philip A. Ringstrom

Comparing Fruit and Oranges: Response to Philip A. Ringstrom

“…The subtitle of a recent article by Ringstrom (2010) exhibits an obvious category mistake-the error of comparing a general category (relational psychoanalysis) with an instance of that category (intersubjective-systems theory)-that renders the core of his argument logically incoherent (see also Jacobs, 2010). That Stephen Mitchell, whose "challenge" Ringstrom's article is supposedly meeting, regarded intersubjective-systems theory as an instance of relational psychoanalysis is shown unambiguously by Mitchell's and Aron's (1999) inclusion of our chapter on the unconscious in their volume, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition.…”