VARIETY
Edith Kurzweil
FREUDIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE
Seventy years after Freud's visit
to
America, the Interna–
tional Psychoanalytic Association met for the first time in this country.
Top mental health and psychiatric officials who had come to greet the
Freudians assured them that psychoanalysts had joined their own
ranks, arid had become "established." And Mayor Koch welcomed
them to New York, urging them to venture beyond the cool Waldorf–
Astoria into the other boroughs. But to judge from the attendance at
meetings, most of the 2300 analysts took their work seriously: they
stayed around to argue about abstruse theoretical and clinical issues.
And although, as we will note, they had many differences about theory,
and about training, the meetings, for the most part, were friendly, as
participants related their own therapeutic experiences to the formation
of theories arising out of collective clinical data, and
to
Freud's
original formulations.
No one could attend the many simultaneous workshops and
sessions, nor read all the papers. But I was struck by the fact that
Freudians now read Freud more critically (and no less appreciatively)
than they had, for instance, at their congress in Vienna, in 1971. Quite
possibly, the Freudian analysts' fall from grace, or at least from
popularity, which has taken different forms in other countries, has led
to a healthy reexamination of themselves, to a personal as well as an
institutional "reanalysis" -a painful ordeal for anyone.
Actually, institutional reanalysis had been a topic of the precon–
gress on training-the meeting of representatives of each of the orga–
nizations belonging to the International Psychoanalytic Association
(I.P.A.). Official reports about these closed meetings indicated that
participants had questioned the nature of the relation of psychoanaly–
sis to psychotherapy, and the implications from the varying positions
(with advantages and disadvantages) adopted by medicall y or nonmed–
ically trained supervising analysts as they related
to
candidates in an
institute and
to
the society around them. These concerns with training,
