You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
DEAR AARON,
I have now re-read our paper on enuresis and am ready to begin our dialogue.
I recognize that authors always say they are misunderstood. Despite the hazard involved, I admit to the thought that you misread or misunderstood what we said in the paper. It is true that both for the adult patients and the youngsters who were tested we spoke about castration anxiety but nowhere do we state that it is the castration anxiety that is the cause of the enuresis. We begin the paper by saying that the central dynamic mechanism is the split in the ego (we do not say it is the castration anxiety). That the castration anxiety might institute a regression or might be awakened from some other sources, there is no doubt. We seem to believe that. But nowhere do we say what you ascribe to us, namely, that the castration anxiety creates the split in the ego. We clearly say that the split in the ego is the product of an archaic mode of magical thought which may arise out of fixation or regression.
I will, of course, plead guilty to the idea that we reconstructed from adult analyses. We also published some test results from children, most of whom were in treatment. From what we learned of the treatment and what we saw of the tests, these children did have the split in the ego, the sleep disturbance, the confusion between reality and fantasy, etc. as well as severe castration anxiety.
I must also confess that I am amazed at your remarks concerning reconstruction. So far as I can tell, the observations of children have not been the ones which have provided us with so much information about the nature of symptoms. So far as I can tell, it is primarily the reconstructions from the analysis of adults that has told us a great deal about childhood, development, and maturation and symptom formation, not the other way around. Your scepticism is justified but hardly convincing in view of the history of the development of psychoanalytic thought. Again, with Silberstein, he had a