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I am going to limit myself to a few brief comments on three areas: 1. the reception of the results of modern infant research, 2. the changes within the field of psychoanalytic methods of treatment and 3. the political dimensions of the psychoanalyst's professional situation in Germany today.
The results of modern, empirical infant research have been studied very attentively by German psychoanalysts for the past several years. Some consider these results to be the reason for a change in psychoanalytic developmental psychology and also in the psychoanalytic treatment methods. Especially findings concerning the intensive social relationships of infants during the first year of life could induce psychoanalysts to reassess their positions towards patients and to alter their methods accordingly, so as to give patients the opportunity to gain pre-verbal experience in the sense of “affect attunement” (1). Some of us are also of the opinion, that the solely verbal psychoanalytic therapy cannot compensate for deficiencies within the early mother-child-relationship which the child suffered from before it learned to speak.
On the other hand there are those colleagues who in spite of considering the results of infant research to be very interesting, think that these findings will not considerably change the methods of psychoanalytic treatment. The subject of psychoanalysis remains the unconscious fantasy, and for that reason psychoanalysis is a “mental” therapy and science (2), and the object of psychoanalytic work is always the infantile part of the adult patient here and now, and never the infant of the past. In any case it is a question of remembrance, of a construction and not of a reconstruction, so that disastrous or disturbed early mother-child-relationships should also be portrayable as well as treatable within a spoken dialogue between patient and analyst.
We cannot foresee the outcome of this discussion, but it has already become evident, that most psychoanalysts in Germa