Discussion

George Engel's passionate discourse touches a raw nerve of the body psychoanalytic, the state of crisis in psychoanalytic research, which is linked to and part of a wider crisis in psychoanalysis generally, but at the same time with very special historical and ecological determinants of its own. The larger dilemma of psychoanalysis in our society, the increasing criticism of our discipline both within the scientific-academic community and within the thoughtful and heretofore sympathetic intellectual community at large, has many sources—our collective failure to live up to the enthusiastic overselling of our therapeutic promise that ushered in our sweeping acceptance by educated America but a generation ago; the limited direct applicability of psychoanalysis to the vast problems of social and psychological dysfunction that mark our increasingly complex and troubled urban civilization; together with our aloofness, up to this point, for the most part, from the vigorous communal tackling of these major social, economic, and psychological problems, even in their specific mental health components, like the community mental health center movement, etc. Engel, in his all too brief exposition, hints at some of these issues of the larger context of crisis. In their different manifestations, they have become increasingly the object of thoughtful concern within our midst (1), (4). It would be a digression to enlarge on them here.