Panel on 'The Changing Expectations of Patients and Psychoanalysts Today'

The Chairman, Wolfgang Loch, suggested some topics which might be discussed in connexion with the title of this panel:

• 1Do we still have the same expectations now as we had previously in terms of the goals of psychoanalysis, for example to translate the id into the ego?

• 2Are we still satisfied with such therapeutic expectations as a gain in the capacity for love and work?

• 3Do we think that unconscious expectations regarding gains through psychoanalysis have changed, or do we believe that conscious expectations only have changed?

• 4Have our psychoanalytic models changed deeply, or are the changes in our theoretical and technical models only minimal?

• 5Can we say that there have been changes in the psychoanalytic setting, or are Freud's basic paradigms essentially unchanged?

To these basic questions various members of the panel attempted to give some answers; the contributions from the floor, however, seemed to focus more on the problem of change rather than on changing expectations, and many speakers addressed themselves mainly to social change.

There were three clearly discernible tendencies in the discussions: (1) contributions addressed mostly to changes in social circumstances with their influences on the patient, on the analyst and on the type of demand for psychoanalytic treatment; (2) those which dealt with the problem of changes in the types of psychopathology encountered in analytic practice today; and (3) addresses which dealt with the problem of changing expectations from the intrapsychic point of view as well as changes in our theoretical framework which might influence these expectations.

If the problems were more often dealt with from the point of view of changes and not changing expectations, it was possibly because the large audience characteristic of international meetings does not easily allow the uncovering of subjective, personal expectations.