I want to speak about the aims of THERIP.* I shall do so in a rather rambling and anecdotal way, but my purpose could not be more serious. What we mean by ‘teaching’ and ‘research’ and how we conduct those activities lie — alongside clinical practice and institutional arrangements — at the heart of the discipline. I suggest this is more the case with respect to psychoanalysis than, say, thermodynamics, because of its essentially reflexive nature. Its objects are always in a fundamentally dialectical relationship with the subjectivity of the practitioner, whether he or she be therapist, researcher, teacher or patient or any combination of these.

When I decided to address this theme I had but one thought — a useful, probably even important, one — but the more I thought about the topic, the more complicated, fraught, polemical, risky and daunting it became. My initial thought was, I later came to realize, something of a reprise of a paper I wrote a quarter of a century ago, entitled ‘Scholarship and the history of the behavioural