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This book documents a meeting in London between André Green and Daniel Stern, who debated the controversy between clinical and observational research in psychoanalysis—especially the relevance to psychoanalysis of observing babies and their mothers. The debate is
of general interest and is a rich, accessible, and useful presentation of the controversy.
Following an excellent introduction by Riccardo Steiner, an earlier debate, between Green and Robert Wallerstein, presents the controversy in a broader context—the relevance of any formal research to psychoanalysis. Green defines psychoanalysis as focused specifically on the unconscious realm of desire. He argues that most investigations neglect the intrapsychic and the unconscious, and that Freud's topographic model has been misinterpreted in relation to the ego—that the id and the theory of drives have been rejected and replaced by a psychological interpretation of behavior, which leads to oversimplifications. He stresses that transference and the unconscious cannot be observed directly and must therefore be “deduced.” Wallerstein, by contrast, believes we should not give up systematic investigation of analysis, but need to devise methods that do not violate the nature or spirit of psychoanalysis. He disagrees also with Green's restrictive definition of psychoanalysis, preferring a more encompassing view, from the surface to the depths of the mind.
In the main debate, between Green and Stern, the former argues that infant observation cannot access the life of the infant in a way relevant to psychoanalytic thought. Events from that early period can only be reconstructed later, after their occurrence. For Green, the clinical setting is the only place one can attain real analytic knowledge. In addition, he argues, an observer's subjectivity inevitably distorts what is described. (Surprisingly, Stern does not challenge this critique on the ground that psychoanalytic interpretation suffers from the same limitation; for f