2: Peter Fonagy

I need an airlift. Anybody? Any CAT therapists around? I need a reformulation. I had an earlier draft of Tony's paper and I have a terrible sense of the goalposts having been just slightly moved. I had a thought about leaving [Laughter], but then I thought: I give myself an interpretation instead. ‘The only thing is, stop thinking that he's your father. Don't worry about it.’ [Laughter]

The psychoanalytic literature on the mind and the self is just about co-terminous with the entire psychoanalytic corpus. You will not be surprised that I too shall fight shy of summarising it in the next 30 minutes. Nor do I want to spend the time allocated to me by offering an unrequited psychoanalytic critique of CAT. I would be reluctant to do that, primarily because there is much that I greatly admire in Tony Ryle's work which I have followed fairly closely over the last 15 or so years and which he so clearly summarised for us this evening. I particularly respect the exceptional combination of a desire for theoretical purity and technical eclecticism which CAT represents. I share his conviction that psychotherapeutic technique should be pragmatically innovative and intellectually adventurous. I, along with the majority of outcome researchers, do not share his optimism concerning brief therapy, as I think the evidence from well controlled studies points to at best 20-25% long-term improvement following even the better structured psychotherapeutic intervention with chronic psychiatric patients (Roth & Fonagy, in press). However, a discussion on the efficacy of brief interventions would not go very far in addressing our ambitious topic for this evening. So what I have decided to do as a compromise is to identify a very selected set of psychoanalytic ideas which relate to the question of the mind and self, and try to integrate these with Tony Ryle's paper this evening to the best of my ability and knowledge.

The ‘Self versus Self-Representation

Confusion and ambiguity surrou