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In JAPA 45/2 Henry Smith (1997) rightly calls attention to the inevitable distorting influence of personal needs on every reader's understanding of a text. He is also correct in his judgment that the varied interpretations of the past that result cause great difficulties in subsequent communication within disciplines. The published discussions among contributors that JAPA has begun to feature are one effective remedy for such a confusion of tongues; in fact, Smith's paper constitutes an extension of such a dialogue, for it is a postscript to a colloquium it published about one of my contributions (Gedo 1995a, JAPA 43/2) in which Smith (1995) participated and to which I had the opportunity to add (I thought) the last word (1995b).
Both because Smith again raises some very important issues and because his very title, “Creative Misreading,” implies that innovators like myself are more responsible for the current Babel in psychoanalysis