On Communication of Ideas

IN THE NAME OF the Committee on Psychoanalysis as a Science of Man, which expresses one of the Institute's concerns, welcome to today's all-day sessions. Members of this committee will present ideas that had some determination in our group discussion—questions and ideas raised by individuals and bounced back and forth in the group as sounding board. In addition to presenting these ideas we very much desire a response from the audience, a free and spontaneous response, and for that reason we are restricting the presentations by the panelists to ten minutes each in order to allow greater participation by the audience. What will be presented cannot possibly be complete because of time and because some of the subjects touch on such profound matters that there simply couldn't be closure.

The impetus for this committee, and so the impetus for today's meeting, comes from Earl Witenberg's concern and confrontation as to what the direction of an institute for psychoanalysis can be in the immediate future, say, in units of five, ten, fifteen years. Is the future of the White Institute to take shape as an institute for the science of man? This committee was given its mandate by the Board of Fellows to explore ideas, whatever they might be and from whatever source, that would be relevant to this concern and without any precharting of our course. We were given, so to speak, the opportunity for a confrontation with the unknown. The unknown was unknown in terms of method and in terms of content.

This committee is now in its fourth year. The first year considered what the philosophy of science might have to offer us starting in under the chairmanship of the first chairman, Rollo May, with a brilliant weekend seminar under Professor Abraham Kaplan. The first day of that seminar was the formal presentation of some of his ideas of identification, identity, and the self, which was