Discussion

Ann Scott: I'd like to thank both speakers very warmly. Could I start by asking Tony Ryle whether he would like to make any response to Peter Fonagy's paper?

Tony Ryle: I think honestly it'd be better if we let the assembled multitude bring up the points that they'd like.

Andrew Samuels: I'll get the ball rolling. While this was going on, I was having a fantasy - what Jungians call ‘active imagination’ when they're not writing about the self - and in it I was asking myself: how would the debate go if it was CAT that had started at the end of the last century, in an exotic locale in the middle of Europe, and what if Peter was the Ryle Professor of CAT now; and what would be said about psychoanalysis? Because the thrust of the whole thing seemed to me to be psychoanalysis looking at CAT, rather than the other way round. And I wonder what, if CAT were the senior therapy, CAT would say about psychoanalysis.

Tony Ryle: It requires a very radical rethink, because in fact it wasn't that way round, and intellectual history takes place, and one reads things and learns things from the last 100 years.

Member of the audience: Try and imagine ‥ .

Tony Ryle: I'm too pragmatic and down-to-earth for that!

Andrew Samuels: I have some ideas, but they may seem not very nice to psychoanalysis (then after all that can't be helped) [Laughter]. I wonder if CAT would see psychoanalysis as a therapy overly concerned with conformism or adaptation; invested in an adultomorphic fantasy about the child? Now these are picked up from Tony Ryle's talk. And I wonder if CAT would say that psychoanalysis perpetuates dependency on the basis of a power imbalance, or something like that? Would that be the kind of thing we could fantasise about?

Tony Ryle: Well, the other way round, I could ask some questions about whether the insights achieved through the regression induced by intensive and long-term treatment are necessarily the best or the only road to a radical change in the individual. Most learning takes