Concluding Comments on the Congress Topic

Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is indeed a pleasure and an honour to have the opportunity of presenting these concluding comments on the Congress Programme and of sharing with you my observations and reactions.

It was the hope of the Programme Committee that we would have a series of dialogues in which vital issues which played an essential role in every psychoanalyst's professional life could be discussed and examined. I believe that the Committee's wishes have been fulfilled and that the Congress participants have responded to this charge quite effectively. We have read and heard various points of view on a number of these 'vital issues'; and there has been considerable clarification, if not resolution, of these different viewpoints. I have not attempted a review of the material presented in the various sessions; that is the task of the reporters (for whose help in this presentation I am most grateful) and their summaries of the panels and dialogues can be found in Congress issues of the International Journal(Shengold & McLaughlin, 1976); (Serebriany, 1976); (Curtis & Sachs, 1976); and in this issue: Dewald & Kramer; Naiman; Cramer & Flournoy; Thiel & Treurniet; Ferber & Krent). My focus is on the differences which emerged in these dialogues; and while I have tried to be an objective reporter, I fear that you will not have to strain your clinical aptitudes to expose my own inclinations and bias.

The promise of a real dialogue was already realized in the prepublished position papers of Green (1975) and Rangell (1975) and reaffirmed in the dramatic and exciting interchange between them at the Opening Session (see Shengold & McLaughlin, 1976). These are more than 'just' scientific papers. In addition to the many substantive points each contains, we can share with these respected analysts their psychoanalytic credos: a distillate of their feelings and philosophy about psychoanalysis, their clinical observations, how they think about these observations a