Changes in Psychoanalytic Practice and Experience

Members of the London Congress who read or listened to the prepublished papers by Leo Rangell (1975) and André Green (1975) had little chance to bridge the gap between these two widely divergent presentations. Rangell defended the hard-won insights of psycho-analysis and their therapeutic value by quoting their continuing efficiency when dealing with the consequences of the infantile amnesia, with anxiety, pathological defence, guilt and depression. He pleaded for adding new discoveries to the old instead of discarding the latter in favour of the former. André Green, on the other hand, deplored the failure of present-day psycho-analysis to effect cures when applied to the psychotic core of human nature or to the more severe, psychotic-type disturbances. He gave proof of experimentation with far-reaching modifications of technique and theory, offering a range of clinical examples.

It was not easy for anyone, under these circumstances, to extract from the authors' formulations what might be valid predictions for the future of the psychoanalytic discipline.

My own efforts in this direction fasten on to André Green's description of the 'malaise' felt by present-day analytic workers, a frame of mind which I cannot help to contrast with the satisfaction and excitement which governed the attitude of the pioneering, early psychoanalysts, a series of generations to which I myself belong. What caused this elated mood were several different circumstances. We felt that we were the first who had been given a key to the understanding of human behaviour and its aberrations as being determined not by overt factors but by the pressure of instinctual forces emanating from the unconscious mind; that we were the first therefore to see mental illness as a battle between rationality and irrationality; that we were the first also to possess a method, namely free association, for breaking down the barrier between consciousness and the unconscious; that this m