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Most analysts of the past would have felt quite at home with the discussions assembled here. To be sure, they would have been shocked by our panelists' skepticism about objective truth and the cheerful confession that they regularly distort and contaminate the scene. Many analysts of an earlier age would have raised an eyebrow, along with Spillius (Countertransference Panel), at present-day analysts' preoccupation with their own psychology. But for the most part, analysts of any time or place would recognize these topics as ones they, too, have wrestled with. What would have surprised our analytic forebears, I think, is the new interest in what I would call the problem of the continuum, under which rubric I include the various problems arising from the fluid quality of mental processes.
The mind has at least a surface unity and spreads itself out smoothly over time. It is never easy to justify breaking it up into parts, as we must do in order to think and talk about it. When Freud looked beyond easily delineated, physical seduction, beyond symbols frozen in time, beyond dreams that have a beginning and end, and beyond traumatic memories with borders around them, he came face to face with a fluctuating, seamless personal reality structured by protean wishes. Gazing on that full stream of mind, he regretfully noted how much harder it is to demonstrate transference manifestations, diffused throughout behavior, than it is to point to dream symbols specified by the patient (1905, p.116) But Freud was not unprepared—this was not his first encounter with the continuum. Freud's lasting contribution to aphasiology (1891) was made possible by his appreciation of the interconnectedness of cognition where others had seen only pieces and places. When it came time to build a theory of the mind, he was careful not to take the separation of structures too literally.
In subsequent years psychoanalysts had their hands full learning to manipulate the model and find shapes in treatment s