Reply To Discussants

THIS is a difficult topic for psychoanalysts. For one thing, most of us are not trained to think about larger social systems, such as organizations, much less professions. As Marylou Lionells notes, it is easy to feel unsure of our intellectual footing in this area. For another, we are in the midst of the topic we are trying to think about. This is always difficult, as we know from our clinical work; but it is doubly difficult in this case because there has been so much mystification in the discussions we have had on the topic of our professional identity—and so much anxiety.

The discussants of my paper make it clear that they are by no means complacent defenders of the status quo. I am deeply heartened by their thoughtful responses, not only to my paper, but also to the many troubling issues we face collectively as psychoanalysts. I have the sense that more and more individuals are engaging this urgent task of probing our professional shortcomings and failures. All the more, then, do I appreciate this opportunity to try again to clarify the issue of professionalization. The comments here have helped me to understand the difficulty of communicating my point about psychoanalysis as a profession.

Like Marylou Lionells, I do not believe that psychoanalysis is dead or dying—but she and I both understand that this “psychoanalysis” is not a set of procedures that involve three, four, or five times weekly visits to a couch. If one thinks of “psychoanalysis” more broadly as an overlapping set of ideas, assumptions, and procedures—what Auden in his elegy for Freud called “a climate of opinion”—it is still lively and still growing. But to look at psychoanalysis this way is to look, for the most part, outside our professional training institutes and associations. Inside those institutions, psychoanalysis is besieged and constricting. The marketing survey commissioned by the American Psychoanalytic Association, to which both Lionells and Meyers refer, is a vivid demonstration of