Final Summary Statement

R. Wallerstein: My four predecessors who appeared this afternoon have given us four perspectives on the problem of character — very characteristic perspectives, as Sam Abrams pointed out to us, and you will see, from my way of organizing my material, something of my own characteristic ways of doing things.

The task of summarizing the weekend's proceedings imposes a demand or requirement on me, but at the same time gives me an opportunity to organize my own thoughts in relation to an important arena of psychoanalytic thinking. This year I am going to approach the job somewhat differently. I will presume on my prerogative as the Chairman of this last session to impose my own perspective and my organization on things more openly than I have in the past, in addition to reflecting what I hope is a consensus of the emergent themes and questions.

I will not discuss in any detail the clinical presentations of Duncan McLean and Jim Herzog. You are all familiar with them. I will begin with an overall generalization which will set my organizing frame. Although not explicitly stated, what this whole conference has been about, in my view, is the limitations of psychoanalysis, and of psychoanalytic knowledge. In devising the various headings under which to bring up the issues which emerged during the weekend, I was thinking in terms of what I call ‘dimensions of ignorance’. Len Shengold made that point in the very first opening session, and he made it much more eloquently and poetically in his statement to us just now. Herb Schlesinger, on the same theme, said, well you know it's also not just our ignorance; it's not that if we try harder, ultimately we'll know more. We may be dealing with inherent limitations in what psychoanalysis as a method can do, and what we can learn from it. In this connection I am thinking of the unwitting disservice done to the field by ego psychology. Hartmann apparently assumed that psychoanalysis was or could become a general psychology encompassing ev