Final Summary Statement

R. Wallerstein: My concept of the weekend's theme was really twofold; and I think two separate themes became conflated in the title, a central one and a more auxiliary one. The central theme, really, is the nature of the process of change in psychoanalysis; and this has been the focus of our discussion, whether, with ego psychologists, you want to call it structural change (a phrase which was hardly used this weekend); or, with Ed Weinshel, psychoanalytic change; or, with Strachey in the 1930s, the mutative process. The auxiliary theme, which was actually incorporated in the main one, was the similarities and differences in these processes of change in work with children and with adults. This was less discussed yesterday morning. There was a passing reference to it by Herb Schlesinger, who thought that children's play and playfulness and the play of metaphor in work with adults are in some ways comparable and in others distinctly different. However this auxiliary theme was less fully developed.

I will take the two up in that sequence. The first, which I have called the central question, was set by Sam Abrams in the very elegant outline with which he opened the Colloquium yesterday morning, and which is the process of change or the mechanism of action of the psychoanalytic treatment in which we are all engaged. It was a question which has obviously occupied us a over many years. My own career in psychotherapeutic research, which began back in the 1950s, was centred on just this issue - the study of long-term psychotherapies, analytic psychotherapies and psychoanalyses in order to try to answer two simple, seemingly simple-minded questions: what changes take place, and how do these changes come about? In those days, we seemed to have a much greater certainty about these things. The early fifties was a more naive era in which we knew much more clearly what were the differences between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and how each brought about change: issues which have