PSYCHOANALYSIS TODAY
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conscience in the indi vidual. Now, I would assume, as Dr. Lowen–
feld su ggested, that in these two cultures something had happen ed in
the basic father-son relationship whi ch was then formul ated in thi s
myth , which then in turn served
to
strengthen character structure in
a certain way. But how did this change take place? As analysts we
exceed our dimension s if we feel that we have a grea ter expertise in
answerin g this question.
Dr. Salzinger spoke about the exclusiveness of psychoanalys ts.
That's true in an organization al sense. But it is not true in the sense
o f n ame-calling, when we speak of the inner p roblems of man .
Essenti all y ours is a technical approach. Reall y what the psychoana–
lyti c technique en ables the analysl to do with any degree of experti se
is
to
understand the n ature of the individual' s intra-psychi c confli cts.
T he fu rther you get away from that central area of controll ed
observati on the less reliable are your results, and I think it was Mr.
Birnbaum who spo ke about the difficu lties in p sycho-hi story and
some of the other fi elds.
Sometimes, wh en I h ear some of my coll eagu es who venture into
these o ther fi elds, I wince, becau se I realize what an expert in the
other fi elds would be thinking about the limited background th at
one of my coll eagues may be usi ng. But then I hear people from
o ther fi elds speaking about p sych oanalysis and I wince for them.
T here has
to
be a meeting ground of sh ared experiences, and people
have to be trained p erhaps in mo re than one di scipline; and this is
one o f the diffi culti es. But we have to understand the limitations of
the an alyti c method; it is bes t in understanding intra-psychic con–
fli cts. It gets less and less reliabl e the grea ter the distan ce, the grea ter
the application ou t of the ex trapo la tion of that area.
Just one more point, and tha t is about psychoanalys ts. I h ave
often said they are li ke th e hysteri cal patients. T hey suffer from
remini scen ces and they are in a la rge sen se the capti ves of their own
hi story, and the hi story of excl u siveness, a kind of xenophobia
whi ch arose out of the original stru cture of analysis and later was
exemplifi ed in analys is as a movement, and whi ch reall y has been
in stituti onali zed in the training procedures. T hat is one of the great
difficulti es in the fi eld, and it has led from, shall we say, a politi cal
po in t of view, to the Ameri can Psychoanalytic Association making, I
think, the wrong decision each time in regard
to
medi cine, the
community, the broadening of its app roach, and so forth. We' re well
aware o f these diffi cu lties but I just want to say p ubli call y, they' re
true. T hank you .
