Amagansett Revisited

It is a rare opportunity and a special privilege to respond to the thoughtful commentaries of seven colleagues who have devoted time and effort to evaluating my contribution. When I was invited to give the plenary address printed in these pages I wanted most of all to portray how the community of psychoanalysts looked upon psychoanalysis as a science. It was for this reason that I chose to imagine an informal meeting of friends talking about their views of psychoanalysis as a science. And it is thus fitting for a group of psychoanalysts to comment on my effort and for me to respond. I was also careful to select participants in my Amagansett colloquy who would in my judgment represent the different points of view on the subject that characterize contemporary psychoanalysis. For this reason I was gratified by Meehl's referring to my effort as a “clear, fair, forceful presentation.”

But I also had another objective, which very much depended on achieving a “clear, fair, forceful” presentation of these different points of view: to suggest a way in which these points of view, each representing an important conception of psychoanalysis as a science, can productively complement and strengthen one another. For this reason I was gratified that Grossman emphasized early in his commentary that I was calling for an “integration of approaches to gathering and collating information for the development of psychoanalytic theory” and “a scientific method of observation consisting of the therapeutic setting, experimental methods outside that