Consilient psychoanalysis.

Abstract

The concept of consilience, that is, the fundamental unity of knowledge across disciplines, is applied to the field of psychoanalysis. Whereas practitioners in other disciplines, especially the natural sciences, strive for consilience, psychoanalysis as a discipline is found to be frequently lacking in consilience. Implications for paradigm change, metatheory, and evidence-based practice are discussed, and it is suggested that all psychoanalytic theories should be evaluated for their degree of consilience so as to make the discipline as robust and well integrated with knowledge in other disciplines as possible.