Discussion

IT IS A PLEASURE TO BE back here with the William Alanson White Institute. Having been with you for your 40th anniversary celebration a few years ago I feel like an old friend. It is also a treat to be able to discuss a paper of Mike Basch. I am a long-time fan of his, admiring the clarity of his presentations and the capacity to step outside our usual framework, to bring a fresh perspective to bear. His work on affect, for example, has become a quick classic in analytic literature. This paper is vintage Basch, attempting to give us a logical up-to-date frame of reference for going about our work. His theme of unification, and the need to draw together multiple perspectives under a broad view of development, with technical interventions guided by diagnostic considerations, is entirely consonant with my own views on the current state of analytical thought. In fact, several times while reading the paper I had the feeling that those are my lines. Having been educated in an institute that was founded specifically over the battle for the freedom to disavow dual instinct theory and libido economics, quite comfortable with the view that psychoanalysis was alive and changing and changeable—we even read Sullivan in the curriculum—I vividly recall the first time I gave a paper on masochism outside my own group and ran into the ferocity of dogmatists who were also inept in their scholarship. I discussed the need to free ourselves of the shibboleth of the nuclear role of the Oedipus Complex in all neurosis. The discussant of my paper launched into a ferocious personal attack, stating that I had revealed my own anti-analytic bias and my contempt for Freud by using the word shibboleth—a non-scientific primitive epithet—in referring to the idea of the Oedipus Complex as the nucleus of neurosis. Had my discussant been a better scholar he would have realized that it was Freud himself who referred to the belief in the centrality of the Oedipus complex as a shibboleth. I r