Discussion

It appears that the disagreement this evening is going to have to come from the audience rather than from the discussants so… without asking Dr. Rosen's permission I am going to discuss his paper as if it were titled “The desirability of exposing yourself to various new non-psychoanalytic therapeutic modalities and incorporating those compatible with your personality and therapeutic orientation into a sound psychoanalytic framework and then if necessary giving good reasons for doing so.” One can raise many theoretically valid or perhaps pedantically provocative questions about Dr. Rosen's case illustrations and some of his dynamic hypotheses but I don't believe these are relevant here this evening although perhaps some other time they might be. What is relevant is that Dr. Rosen has stated that, without renouncing his psychoanalytic framework and heritage he has been adventuresome, brave or whatever other words we may ascribe to him, and has exposed himself to these various new techniques, gimmicks — if we want to use that somewhat contrived word — and found the ones, that for him, seem to work better and faster in reaching people. Now he has more or less specifically chosen to focus on five of these although he has really only discussed three. May I point out that he takes for granted group therapy and the marathon and doesn't even mention a discussion of these although they are really new modalities, not perhaps as new as some of the others, and in certain psychoanalytic circles are still frowned upon very strongly.

I would like very briefly to give our discussion a historical perspective, that I think will be helpful. In essence there have been three main psychological forces to date, or currents if you wish: the first was the behaviorist — shades of Pavlov and Skinner and certainly a resurgence of this approach with the works of Wolpe and others. Now we are not here to discuss the values and the pros and cons of behavior therapy, but I do think that it behooves u