The Search for Common Ground

A search for common ground should be based on a shared understanding of why it is a good thing to do, why it should be a rewarding thing to do, and how to go about it in a sound way. For, to begin with, a heterogeneous group of analysts, such as we are, would have to be standing on some common ground before it could discuss the theme of this Congress usefully. Even to begin to try to establish that preparatory common ground, the group would have to take up numerous issues of a linguistic, methodological, and ideological nature. A few of the pre-Congress papers in our Journal did begin that job, and Ricardo Bernardi of Uruguay in the Journal's current issue (Volume 70, Part 2) and also in one of our Panels here added excellent discussions of these complex matters. In contrast, I find in much of what I have been able to observe here a great deal of that mixture of misunderstanding, ignoring, misrepresentation, and over-eager rejection or accommodation with which we are all too familiar. Also, there has been much sheer assertion presented as argument and much hasty supervision of respected colleagues. Because in my view the ground for discussion has not been adequately prepared, I shall be devoting my opening commentary to a review, necessarily brief and incomplete, of the thorny, if not impossible, way to useful discussion of common ground.

In the clinical setting one must not be beguiled by manifest content. Searching at this Congress for common ground, we encounter another kind of ambiguous manifest content, namely the words that make up technical and theoretical vocabularies. For example, for present purposes the words analyse transference must be taken as manifest content. Both analyse and transference are treacherous words, treacherous because analysts of the same and different persuasions use them in association with too many different conceptions of childhood development; of psychopathology; of repetition and its basis, func