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This Conference is devoted to a discussion of the similarities and differences between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The topic is not of course a new one; indeed there have been many discussions of it and there is a voluminous literature on the subject. The substantial literature is in fact testimony to the degree to which the problem of differentiation between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy remains unsolved. Many authors have spelled out for us the differences between the two, and have provided us with long lists of criteria for differentiating one from the other. Yet in spite of all these helpful lists, which overlap substantially, problems of differentiation remain and it is my task in this introductory paper to try to address some of these. I shall do this in the knowledge that one cannot approach the question free from emotional bias. Each of us has a vested interest in our own profession, in our training, and in the type of practice we pursue. There is little doubt that those of us who have trained as analysts will on the whole have different views on the relation between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy from those who have been trained as psychotherapists from the start - this is not to say that all analysts have a common view nor that psychotherapists share the same conception of the differences. Apart from anything else, psychoanalysts who do not practise psychotherapy and those who do must inevitably look at the problems involved from quite different perspectives. It takes us years to become proficient at our work, and with this proficiency comes a sense of ‘rightness’ in the particular methods we use. The whole area is also complicated by the ‘political’ issues involved, linked with our different trainings - the British PsychoAnalytical Society, the British Association of Psychotherapists, the Tavistock Clinic, for example.
We can perhaps all agree that what we shall be discussing during these two days refers to various