You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A Symposium on this subject was held at New York University under the chairmanship of Sidney Hook, on March 28-29, 1958, and the proceedings are now available in book form. Most of the participants in the Symposium were philosophers, while a few came from psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. Psychoanalysis was represented by Heinz Hartmann, Lawrence Kubie, Abram Kardiner, and Jacob Arlow.
The Symposium was opened with a paper by Hartmann on "Psychoanalysis As a Scientific Theory" in which the subject was treated in general terms and special attention was given to metapsychology. Hartmann's paper deserves careful discussion by psychoanalysts, but most of the participants in the Symposium could neither know nor appreciate the nature of the experience upon which his remarks were based.
Kubie enumerated the difficulties which stand in the way of exact formulations in psychoanalysis; these range from exclusive dependence on auditory data to the questionable justification for inevitable quantitative pictures of mental life, or to the difficulty of measuring these alleged quantities. Against these liabilities Kubie placed the assets of the analytic situation and of the rule of free associations.
Arlow, whose contribution came later in the proceedings, had by that time discovered that familiarity with the elements of the psychoanalytic method could not be taken for granted; his approach was therefore simpler and more didactic. He tried to show that psychoanalysis is "not an esoteric