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PARTISAN REVI EW
Brenner could interpret Freud to have defined psychoanalysis as a
branch of science that lacks a philosophy of life, whereas Gill could
refute Brenner on grounds that the natural sciences do not deal with
causes, that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic science which includes
expressions of the body, of meaning, and of values. Both Brenner a.nd
Gill quoted Paul Ricoeur, but, I believe, forgot that Ricoeur's herme–
neutics, in the last analysis, not only praise Freud's discovery of the
unconscious , but superimpose a belief in God or a higher order which
they both would question. The entire debate had a
deja
vu
quality: it
was a replica-on a high level-of the debates on the scientificity of
sociology, philosophy, or political science; this is part of our
twentieth-century
Zeitgeist,
and, ultimately, proves on ly the mental
versatility of the partici pants.
I found the panels and the workshops that dealt more specifically
with clinical psychoanalysis such as, for example, those on
The Life
Cycle as Indicated by the Nature of the Transference in Children,
Adolescents, and in Older People,
more illuminating. By analyzing
patients' transference and their own countertransference, psychoana–
lysts have gone far beyond Freud's original knowl edge about libidinal
phase organization (oral, anal, phallic-oedipal, latency, genital) and its
relationship to psychic maturation and organization. Research on
children (led in London by Anna Freud, and in America by Margaret
Mahler, John McDevitt, or Eleanor Galenson) allows for the observa–
tion of evolving differentiation of perception, affect, ideas, and action .
Because the child's psychic organization is still in flux, stated Peter
Neubauer, and the transference neurosis, at times, is absent during the
oedipal period and during latency, the child analyst is able to watch the
complexities of progression and regression as the child struggles
to
maintain newly learned reality.
Peter Bios argued that "the adolescent repeats in analysis not only
the pathogenetic past but also the healthy infantile strivings which
activate the formation of psychic structure." H e, and others, illustrated
such theoretical observations with cases. We learned that in one
instance, the analyst repeatedly had to hear about the names, character–
istics, and habits of forty-six animals, before a six-year-old patient
could allow himself to confide his " bad" fantasi es. And we were told
how a seventeen-year-old patient'S sudden lateness for his analytic
session manifested behavior that, originally, "was a conflict with his
father who always had kept his son waiting but accused his son, in case
he was late, for not loving his father ... By submitting meekly for a
year to the rules of analysis the patient had assured himself of the
