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To the Editor:
We have noticed the following in an article by Hanna Segal in the Fall 2006 issue of American Imago:
After those discussions, the British Society had a curriculum in which both trends were taught. Some parts of the curriculum were joint and some, mainly technical, were taught separately. The balance was kept by what was then called the Middle Group. In further developments, the Middle Group, which changed its name to the Independents, also established a new model of the mind, deriving from Ferenczi and developed by Balint, Winnicott, and, later in the United States, by Kohut. The fundamental difference between this model and those of Freud, Klein, and their followers lay not in the fact that it took into account new clinical evidence, but rather in the kinds of uses that it made of clinical evidence. A new concern emerged that focused on various notions of cure and change that did not rest on attaining truth and that considered the personal influences of the analyst—e.g., his support, advice, and comfort—to be integral to the analytic process. Here the changes in technique were of a kind that made them essentially nonanalytic. They went against the psychoanalytic effort to bring about change through the search for truth. For when the analyst actively takes upon himself the parental role, he invites the patient to live in a lie. This in turn promotes concrete functioning rather than symbolization and psychic growth. (288-89)
It is dispiriting to come across such statements about colleagues, especially when the British Psychoanalytical Society