A Shared Vision: Response to Commentaries

Amajor reward of having one's manuscript chosen as a “target paper” is its subjection to rigorous critiques by distinguished colleagues especially knowledgeable in the area under discussion, and the opportunity to respond, and to think (and rethink) one's position more searchingly. Such is my happy fate with the commentaries by Robert Michels and Robert Paul, both of whom have played central roles in academic psychiatry, and in the life of two psychoanalytic institutes (Columbia and Emory) that are among those most successfully embedded in medical school departments of psychiatry, and that have gone beyond that, having made significant inroads into the broader university community.

In my reading, we three share a common vision of the handicaps under which the psychoanalytic educational system has lived since its formal beginnings, now quite close to a century ago, and the many, now significantly increasing, calls for its major revision—from a structure and a credo that seemed forced on the neophyte discipline in Freud's day (and in Freud's academic and intellectual surround) but that now can be fundamentally rethought in light of the broadening possibilities engendered by a century of experience and increasing opportunity. This, of course, is by no means to deny or obscure the questioning perspectives and altered emphases offered by my two commentators, each from a somewhat differing viewpoint.

Paul, himself a major academic administrator (as well as a trained psychoanalyst), seems to accept my more pessimistic assessment that the university at large—with, of course, some outstanding exceptions— is at present basically unreceptive to the panoply of activities that I conceive in my construction of the psychoanalytic center as the optimal feasible organization for psychoanalytic education today. Though he argues at times for the greater feasibility and opportunity available in various sectors of the university structure, basically he explores what he regards as not just