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lytic relationship was carried out here and in Germany. Infant develop–
ment and affect theory were explored from a psychoanalytic view, and
psychoanalysis was applied to sociological research and anthropology, in
France and Latin America. The development of new psychopharmaco–
logical treatments permits the effective treatment of many symptoms of
neurosis, but they are not as useful with regard to the structural psycho–
logical aspects of severe character pathology and personality disorders.
However, the combination of drug treatment and psychoanalytic psy–
chotherapy may reinforce, in selected cases, the effectiveness of the total
treatment approach.
EK:
There is also the promise of what I might call the cheaper therapies,
cheaper emotionally, cheaper financially.
OK:
There are financial pressures directed against any long-term intensive
psychotherapies. Again, I think there is a well-warranted concern of soci–
ety, which has limited resources for psychological treatment, that those
resources be optimally employed, and this requires research on the effects
of psychotherapeutic treatments. The problem is that the study of the
effectiveness of psychotherapeutic treatments has presesnted significant
methodological problems, and it has taken twenty or thirty years to grad–
ually overcome them. It has been a very slow process, but we have made
significant progress. And in the current discussions, this progress is being
ignored.
EK:
That brings me to the next question, about the current preoccupa–
tions, or revelations, about child abuse, which leads
to
the question of
why Freud changed his mind about the roots of child abuse - when did it
take place, when was it real, when was it imaginary, et cetera. You know,
Jeffrey Masson's thesis.
OK:
Freud changed his mind because he discovered that fantasies about
sexual experience, unconscious fantasies about sexual experience in child–
hood, exceeded by far actual traumatic experiences of incest and sexual
abuse. Given the fact that Freud treated a relatively healthy population in
the sense that most of his patients did not come from the brutalized in–
habitants of inner-city ghettos, it is reasonable to assume that incest and
gross sexual abuse was limited among his patient population.
Freud concluded that there were important unconscious fantasies that
were universal and that dealt with infantile sexuality. This was an abso–
lutely revolutionary discovery for which we now have empirical evidence
from infant observation and from childhood observation. And it was, in
my view, a refutation of conventional assumptions about childhood. We
