Fred Pine: The Argument for a Developmental and Radically Open-Minded Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

Fred Pine was a brilliant theoretician, an extraordinarily gifted clinician, an inspiring teacher, and a beautiful writer. He was also a master synthesizer who could hold multiple possibilities, multiple phenomena, multiple observations, and multiple theories in mind, bringing them together in an elegant and rich whole. This paper focuses on Fred Pine’s vision of a truly developmental and “radically open-minded” psychoanalysis, as it was described in a series of theoretical and clinical papers compiled in the volume Developmental Theory and Clinical Process (1985).

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental psychoanalysis
• early childhood experience
• separation-individuation theory
• child psychotherapy

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Patty and Tom Rosbrow for their helpful comments and suggestions during the preparation of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. To his credit, he later changed his mind (Wendy Olesker, personal communication, April, 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arietta Slade

Arietta Slade, PhD, is clinical psychologist and Professor of Clinical Child Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center. She is author, most recently, of Enhancing Attachment and Reflective Parenting: A Minding the Baby Approach (Guilford, 2023).