You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
After the completion of the workshop-group discussions in the morning of the second day, the meeting continued in the afternoon with a further plenary session, this time chaired by Prof. R. Wallerstein, and with a panel consisting of Miss R. Edgcumbe, Dr J. Herzog, Prof. P. Jeammet and Dr S. Abrams. Following the panellists’ contributions, the Chairman invited a discussion from the floor. The Colloquium ended with the Chairman's final summing up.
R. Wallerstein: This year, unlike our practice in past years, we have not specifically charged the people on the panel to act as reporters for their discussion groups. Although their opening statements this afternoon will of course reflect the experiences each panellist has had in his own group, they need not be limited to that and we hope their reports will reflect their reactions to the weekend as a whole.
Rose Edgcumbe, will you speak first?
R. Edgcumbe: I will start by giving a few of my own reactions to the discussions, which, more than anything, are going to be in the form of questions, because when I began reflecting on the topic in anticipation of this meeting my thought was ‘I really don't know at all clearly what I think about self-esteem or shame or the relationship between the two’. I then read the papers and was immensely impressed by the coverage of the literature and the survey of all the current ideas on the subject, not only in psychoanalysis but in other disciplines. I was very impressed with the clinical material too, but I ended up, if anything, even more confused than before. And to some extent I have remained in that state, certainly through the beginning part of the discussions. In so far as I have clarified my own thinking as these two days have gone on, it has perhaps been by a process of exclusion, in the sense of feeling that some things are too broad and too difficult to try and encompass under one heading.
I think what I have clarified - at any rate for myself - is something about the understanding