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have changed. Contrary to popular notions, this is not an adaptation to
reality, but only an understanding of that reality.
In
addition to sessions such as interpretation and validation
(Jacob Arlow), considerations of regression (Hans Loewald), anxiety
neurosis (Joyce McDougall), core gender identity and separation–
individuation (Margaret Mahler and John McDevitt), or the handling
of resistances (Paul A. Dewald and David Rosenfeld), there were
discussions on the effects of the holocaust (Milton E. Jucovy), action
language (Roy Schaefer), on Janus as allegorical divinity (P.e.
Recamier), on external reality as a force in psychoanalysis (Luis Feder),
on the psychoanalytic treatment of handicapped patients (Andre
Lussier and Clifford Yorke), on the role of the father (Eugenio
Gaddini), and many more. Psychoanalysts examined their own role in
society, family transactions, psychosomatic disorder, mourning, and
sleep-dream research. These "applied" topics, of course, were anchored
in theory, and there the recurring controversies revolved around object
relations, narcissism, character disorders, and the concept of self.
To nonanalysts these discussions seem extremely technical and
abstract, so many dancers on the proverbial pinhead-and an invisible
pinhead at that. Nevertheless, as H. Shmuel Erlich pointed out,
psychoanalysts now have more comprehensive models of the early
differentiation and consolidation of the self-as it interacts with
psychic and physical reality, as it relates to the early formation of
psychic structure (i.e., Jacobson, Kernberg, Kohut, Winnicott), and as
its development (and that of the ego-ideal) affect conceptualizations of
the superego (Sandier, Kohut). But all the current explorations keep
harking back to Freud, often explaining textual contradictions and
extrapolating from these. Because all of Freud's original insights have
by now been "filled in" with thousands of cases, the way Freud is
interpreted is more than hero worship: it infl uences clinical work. For
the clinical situation, as Arlow maintained, is the standard method of
investigation. Both
doing
and
being
of the patient are shaped by
experience, and psychoanalysis itself becomes part of experience. With
interpretations, for example, the patient becomes active and learns
about the analyst's technique; and he learns
to
identify with him
during the curative process. Yet the same information means different
things at different times; there are specific sessions; the analyst may pay
special attention to the first thing the patient says; he may hypothesize
as he puts the data together in a meaningful way. Since the analyst has
no physical replica like the physicist
to
reproduce the situation, he
must test his hypotheses against further developments, against what
