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ence they can be cured. But if not, they cannot be cured and analysis
takes years and years and years.
So the whole thing is really that the first, let's say, forty years of
analysis, the patient could adjust to a certain type of culture which
you call bourgeois culture-but I must say I don't know any other
culture. I don't know what you see now as a real culture. There's a
changing, deteriorating culture, and so, analysis becomes very
difficult. We can only say that we still have some patients who can be
cured by anal ysis.
But, for instance, the constant acting out of sex makes analysis
more difficult because in analysis there is always a bit of abstinence.
These patients don't bring the whole libido into analysis; they go
out, take drugs, or meet somebody and have sex. There is a real
change, and I could talk for hours about it. It's a long-term problem,
but I really think that the main problem is that the bourgeois culture
or family is dissolving, and that means that the father wants to be a
little brother and just wants to be loved by the boy: he identifies with
the child and doesn't want the child to identify with him. Now, this
has brought about a complete change in treatment. That's all I want
to say.
William Phillips:
Dr. Person.
Ethel Person:
If
you want to equate psychoanalytic theory with Freud
and limit it to libido theory and structural theory, then I would think
you would have to say it was dead.
If
you want to use psychoanalytic
theory as an explanation totall y of culture and society you would
have to say it is dead. On the other hand, if you want to see
psychoanalysis as a process in a formation of ideas in history, as
opposed to a finished body of work, and if you want to see it as
explaining a partial input into culture and society and individual
behavior, then I think it is very much alive. I would say it is not in a
period of normal science and it surprises me that people outside the
analytic community, even among intellectuals, believe this to be
true. I will simply mention object relations theory, theory of the self,
and ego adaptation as implementing psychoanalytic theory, which
makes it viable in a larger way, though certainly I think very few
people could validly argue that it can be used as a total explanation.
That's all I want to say.
William Phillips:
Thank you. Norman Birnbaum is next.
Norman Birnbaum:
I guess the first thing to say to the complaint that
they don't make patients the way they used to in the old days is that
they don't make analysts the way they used to either. But it seems
to
