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chotherapist, a good psychoanalyst, how to know when you need psy–
chotherapy or psychoanalysis, when you do not.
EK:
There, I think you have almost utopian notions. But I want to get
back to your other point, about victims. It seems to me that new com–
munities of victims keep coming up. And they prefer their own type of
therapists, or at least they are being told that they must be healed by a
specific type.
OK:
Yes, but insofar as these are very often transient fashions, they tend
to shift rapidly enough, so that the most sophisticated members of such
communities eventually move out from that group culture. It's because of
this problem that I have insinuated and often made the point that it is re–
ally important that psychoanalysis strengthens its bridges with the univer–
sity and with the general culture, to offer more widespread knowledge to
the general community, and thereby to properly train more therapists.
However, I think that in an open society such as ours it is unavoidable
and only natural that there are subcultures and cults, and I think we have
to live with that: it's the price we are paying for a degree of freedom and
openness that may be much higher than in other countries.
On the other hand, I think that if there were clearer integration of
the empirical study of personality and personality disorders with the de–
velopment of psychoanalytic knowledge and expertise, an effort to keep
together the biological and the psychological aspects of the personality in
the differing departments of psychology and psychiatry, there could be a
much more integrated network of therapists. After all, if you want to get
an operation, you go to the nearest university and find out who the top
surgeons are. You want to find out which hospital is the best and who
operates there. Well, if the most respected and serious psychological insti–
tutions have a network of information, then they can orient people to
psychotherapies rather than leaving their fate to self-perpetuating victims'
groups.
EK:
You were one of the earliest among American Freudians to seriously
and directly address Melanie Klein's theories of object relations. Why do
you think most of your colleagues were reluctant to do so until the last
couple of years?
OK:
This was due to historical circumstances. In the 1940s, after Europe
was overrun by the Nazis, the center of psychoanalytic development re–
mained in London. Within the British psychoanalytic society, there were
bitter fights between Anna Freud's group and Melanie Klein's group,
with a middle group that then was relatively small. Those fights were ex-
