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In 1946, Winston Churchill, speaking before President Truman at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, said, 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent'. With these words the iron curtain was born. As the hot war ended and the erstwhile allies were jostling for position, the cold war was thus announced—on the Western side of the wall. The history of the next decades was laid down.
To confirm the twist I am here suggesting, 25 years later, in 1971, when Richard Nixon decided it was now expedient for him to visit China, after nothing else had happened to soften relationships except his own change of mind, the bamboo curtain, derivative of the iron one, parted at his command.
What does this have to do with psychoanalysis 1975? I am not having a fugue state; they are related. If you will withhold immediate partisan reactions, pro and con, there is a point to be made from this, about change and objections to it.
Somewhere in the dim history of psychoanalysis, someone who was outside of it and against it, or inside of it and unhappy, conceived of the word 'classical' for those who were developing and holding on to their early views. I cannot trace, nor does it matter, who or where this was. With it, however, psychoanalysts were immediately divided into 'groups', as were all other people. Already in 1910, Freud, in a letter to Jung, who was complaining about his troubles with Bleuler in Zurich, wrote from Vienna, 'I am not lying on a bed of roses myself—My guess is that the insides of other great movements would have been no more appetizing if one could have looked into them. There are never more than one or two individuals who find the straight road and don't trip over their own legs' (McGuire, 1974, p. 366).
In each instance, in the case of the two monoliths of the 'developed' world, and of the two tiny groups of scientists who had just discovered a new light, the words hurled at the other s