CONSILIENT PSYCHOANALYSIS Keith Valone, PhD, PsyD Pasadena, California 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, psycho- analysis as a discipline is found to be frequently lacking in consilience. Impli- cations for paradigm change, metatheory, and evidence-based practice are discussed, and it is suggested that all psychoanalytic theories should be evalu- ated for their degree of consilience so as to make the discipline as robust and well integrated with knowledge in other disciplines as possible. The concept of consilience was recently powerfully articulated by distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. Wilson’s (1998a) book Consilience puts forth an eloquent argument for the fundamental unity of knowledge. In the present article, I familiarize the reader with the construct of consilience as defined by Wilson and others and then apply the notion of consilience to psychoanalysis as a discipline. What Is Consilience? William Whewell coined the term consilience in 1840 in his book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (Whewell, 1840). Consilience literally means the “jumping together of knowledge” by integrating facts and fact-based theory from different disciplines in order to develop a common language and a comprehensive explanatory framework. By bringing together knowledge from different disciplines and learning in what ways integration can be achieved, refinement and expansion of theory takes place in all disciplines involved. Such integrative efforts can point out weaknesses or inaccuracies in particular aspects of a given theory or discipline. Such efforts also can provide support and validation for theory and can create an exciting synergy in which new ideas and understandings occur Keith Valone, PhD, PsyD, independent practice, Pasadena, California. I thank Leroy Hood for introducing me to the construct of consilience and for inspiring this article; Joseph Palombo for encouraging me to write and publish it; Joanne Moran, Katherine Schwarzenbach, and Lisa Krueger for their meticulous editorial comments on a draft of this article; and the staff of the Huntington Memorial Hospital Health Sciences Library for their unflagging assistance in the acquisition of reference materials. I dedicate this article to the memory of my esteemed friend and colleague, Randall Lehmann Sorenson. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Keith Valone, PhD, PsyD, One West California Boulevard, Suite 321, Pasadena, CA 91105. E-mail: kev@valone.com Psychoanalytic Psychology Copyright 2005 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 2005, Vol. 22, No. 2, 189 –206 0736-9735/05/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0736-9735.22.2.189 189