Introduction to Panel on Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy—The Relationship of Psychoanalysis to Psychotherapy—current Issues

It is perhaps singularly appropriate in this 26th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association built around the central theme, "Recent developments in psychoanalysis, " that one of the constituent panels should be on the topic of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. This marks in effect the growing concern within the world-wide family of psychoanalytic endeavour with what has seemed for so long primarily a peculiarly American creation, the body of theory and practice of psychoanalytically-based or psychodynamic psychotherapy, in all of its complex relationships with its psychoanalytic parentage. In America, this development of psychoanalytic psychotherapy has had a substantial, vigorous and disputatious history, and psychotherapy rooted in psychoanalysis as theory has become a dominant voice within the country's medical schools and psychiatric clinical centres. And already, a full decade and a half ago, in the years 1952 to 1954, the American Psychoanalytic Association devoted four full day panels (English, 1953); (Ludwig, 1954); (Rangell, 1954a); (Chassell, 1955) to the comprehensive discussion of the range of issues—and of controversies—both conceptual and technical, comprised in the varying understanding of the relationship between psychoanalysis and the so-called dynamic psychotherapies. By and large, those same issues and those same controversies are still very much with us, to my mind not appreciably altered (let alone resolved) in the crucible of the accumulated clinical experience and the expanded theoretical knowledge that we possess today; in this Congress panel there will be opportunity to consider them from the wider vantage point of the varying experiences of psychoanalysts in the diverse national and regional centres of psychoanalytic activity with their differing historical developments and differing ecological settings.

I can most economically discharge my initial responsibility as chairman of the panel by setting down what I feel to be t