Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Vol 46(3), Aug 2026, 162-179; doi:10.1037/teo0000300
Psychoanalytic clinical reasoning is the inferential process by which analytic therapists are able to develop an understanding of the clinical material. According to a model that is widely held among both detractors and supporters of psychoanalysis, this process would consist in the application of psychoanalytic “theory” to the clinical material. In this article, we argue that this model, which entails a deductive view of clinical reasoning, does not reflect the reality of everyday clinical reasoning by competent analytic therapists and that the crux of the process rather consists in the mobilization of a set of families of conceptual and reflective functions, which we call the operators. We explain why operators are not “theory” in any of the senses in which this term is used in the relevant literature (public, private, or core theory) and propose to think of the relation between operators and theory as that between two different kinds of knowledge: fluid (i.e., implicit, procedural, formal) and crystallized (i.e., explicit, declarative, content-based) knowledge, respectively. In our model, while fluid knowledge is the one that is actually used to draw clinical inferences, crystallized knowledge is relied on as a frame that gives fluid clinical reasoning its context of justification. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)