EDITH KURZWEIL
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ability to attract patients. "None whatsoever," was the usual response.
"We always admitted non-medically trained analysts," said nearly ev–
ery European, Latin American, and South American I spoke to. "This
battle, once again, was started by the Americans," replied a Frenchman.
"We didn't know whom to vote for," or "I didn't know either of the
candidates personally," said some Latin Americans. (The latter were rep–
resented en masse, and more Spanish was spoken than at any previous
IPA congress. Nevertheless, every South American lamented the lack of
patients due to the downturn in their respective economies.) "Finally,
we have become equals," said a number of American clinical psycholo–
gists - while disagreeing about the advisability of accepting individual
membership in the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA), which
until now had shunned them.
I was intrigued by the fact that only a few of my many friends told
me whom they voted for. Thereby, they seemed to extend their psycho–
analytic habit of keeping patients' secrets but indicated, also, their am–
bivalence about priorities: Freud's heuristic division of psychoanalysis into
its three components still holds, and the movement's viability still de–
pends upon the psychoanalysts' steady advances in therapy and theory. To
judge by the presenters' many sensitive summaries of cases - by whatever
theoretical method or technique and in whatever country - this is where
the psychoanalysts' strength continues to be located.
Here, it is impossible for me to get into any of these topics, which
tum around such clinical issues as decentered listening and hearing; ego
strength and external reality in the treatment of an AIDS patient;
implications of symbolism in language and the limits of psychic reality;
the shifting boundary between internal and external reality; intrapsychic
relations between the ego and the unconscious; regression in the
transference and countertransference; belief and its suspension; memory
and perception; resistance to psychic change and means of dealing with
it; techniques adapted to a variety of patients; diagnoses and prognoses;
and much more.
A number of sessions were dedicated to the influence of the material
reality of patients on their psychic reality, especially for those growing up
and living in repressive societies such as Argentina and Chile, for survivors
of the Holocaust and their children; and even on the meaning of discard–
ing the word "genocide" in favor of "Holocaust." Theory, practice, and
politics did come together when, in the business meeting a participant
got up to ask the members of the IPA to condemn the French president,
Mr. Chirac, for having come out in favor of nuclear testing; and when
another introduced a session by equating the Holocaust and Hiroshima.
On balance, however, the speakers in scientific sessions stuck to their
