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the diagnosis of perversion, and illustrated her point by presenting a
patient who had used his sexuality (sometimes with women and
other times with men) compulsively, in the service of homeostasis.
Treatment focused on his fantasies, she said (they cannot be counted
as perversions), and explained how she had used them to help her
patient gain insight and to change his life. Jacob Arlow of New York
criticized Glasser for having paid too little attention to the roles of
the (unconscious) pre-Oedipal father and the Oedipal mother, and
McDougall for having forgotten Freud's "biological" theories . Andre
Lussier's (Montreal) reservations had to do with the diagnoses of
both analysts: he wondered whether the patients they had described
were perverts, since "the true pervert fails to be reassured ." The con–
troversy elicited a heated discussion from the floor, as commenta–
tors, once again, defended their own theoretical positions - "Ameri–
can," "Kleinian," "French," or "South American."
They did so again when they met in workshops during the after–
noon. There, they discussed such technical questions as the vicissi–
tudes and differences between primary and secondary identification,
the confusion between internal reality and object identification, and
that between responses to "catastrophic anxiety," to omnipotence, or
to wishes of symbiosis with the object (usually the mother) . Expect–
edly, a German psychoanalyst thought they ought to drop object
relations theory and go back to drive theory, and a French one ex–
plained the "silence" about perversion as a result of the analysts' diffi–
culties in identifying with such patients, while an Argentinian thought
a Kleinian analysis was the answer. In "my" workshop, the babel of
tongues reached its climax when a young American analyst suggested
that they had no answers, because so few analysts were treating per–
verts, if only because institutional priorities intervened: "Anyone
treating such cases, inAmerica, is not accepted into the inner circle–
where patients are supposed to enter analysis, experience what is ex–
pected, and leave."
The analysts allowed themselves to get emotional over perver–
sions, but then tried to shield themselves from too much personal in–
volvement in questions of the Nazis and the Holocaust. This was clear
when they explained the mechanisms of identity/separation in chil–
dren reared in concentration camps and these children's precocious
awareness of the degradation of their parents - which led to confu–
sion' in a situation where children had to learn when to obey and yet
knew that ultimate obedience entailed death. But the unease of the
commentators came through when they got overly scientific, or when
