You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
LOOKING BACK AT THE FORTY-THREE YEARS since Clara Thompson became the first president of The William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society in 1952, and wanting a view of our future in the twenty-first century, we think of revisiting history. The seriousness and dedication of such a task is, without question, valid. As new data becomes available from previously unpublished records and there is continued remembrance of things past, this begs for deconstruction of old meanings and the structuring of new hypotheses that more completely and consistently fit the information at hand. It is a rational approach to rewriting history. It is valid. Kotre's (1995) work on memory supports this approach. He writes that the “remembering self” has the aforementioned function of a keeper of the archives, fastidiously guarding original records. Whereas Kotre is using this function as an autobiographical search for personal past experience, I am extrapolating its use to the biographical search for experience of the lives of the early interpersonalists. Kotre goes on to say that another function of the remembering self is to seek a comprehensive view of reality, generating a story, a myth that turns events into symbols and metaphors. It is the myth I now pursue, returning to the archives later. As George Vaillant (1977) poetically says, once a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it remembers being a little butterfly.
It is this story-telling approach to the past in the present, an intuitive approach, that is captured in the words of T.S. Eliot (1952) in his Four Quartets when he says
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started