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The chairman, Martin Wangh, commented on the decreasing popularity of psychoanalysis since after the Second World War. The widening scope of psychoanalysis, based on increased knowledge, was accompanied by greater demands for psychiatric services that led to community psychiatry and the various peripheral forms of psychoanalytically-oriented treatment. The earlier idealization of psychoanalysis was followed by disillusionment and condemnation. In addition, the ever-changing social scene brought with it serious challenges to psychoanalysis. In the first panel of this series, "A Critical Assessment of the Future of Psychoanalysis: A View From Within," our colleagues voiced their distress over the pessimistic mood expressed by both K. R. Eissler (1969)1 and Anna Freud (1969).2 It is a challenge to psychoanalysis to try to understand and help the distress of the young that has led them to an attitude that is antihistorical, anti-intellectual and anti-introspective at a time when analysts themselves contribute to the apocalyptic gloom that has enveloped the Western World.
After Ira Miller presented a brief summary of the first panel of this series, John O. Wisdom, University Professor of Philosophy and Social Science, York University, Toronto, spoke. Wisdom disagreed