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The title of this section meeting turned out to be comprehensive, and the participants discussed several ideas implied in the title. What followed were some agreements and disagreements as to—(1) the advisability of new theoretical constructions in psychoanalysis with a view to greater utility over present-day accepted theory; (2) a psychiatric nosology suggested by Karl Menninger; and (3) the advisability of using the term homeostasis, borrowed from physiology, with an attempt to "unify" psychoanalysis with other sciences.
A keynote to this section meeting was given by the Moderator, Roy Grinker, who in introducing Karl Menninger, stated that psychoanalysis at one time was the apex of a wedge with biology and social sciences lagging behind but that now psychoanalysis may be lagging behind these sciences. He felt that psychoanalysis and psychiatry must now look carefully for its boundaries.
In his paper, 1Karl Menninger began by emphasizing the tendency and the need toward the unification of sciences. One source of his motivation in so doing was Anna Freud's "THE EGO AND MECHANISMS OF DEFENSE, " which, for all that it has been so helpful to us in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, is so permeated with such metaphorical thinking