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The Editor of the Journal has kindly invited me to submit some comments to be included in the report of the Amsterdam meeting. What follows is an expanded version of remarks I made from the floor at the time of the meeting.
During the three mornings devoted to the topic, 'The Mind Of The Analyst: From Listening To Interpretation', we were privileged to hear three pre-published papers and twice that number of prepared discussions, as well as comments from the floor and unprepared responses by the panellists themselves both to each other and to the audience. It was interesting to compare the three pre-published papers. Dr Jacobs kept closely to the assigned topic. He told us, as best he could remember, what had gone on in his mind while listening to a patient prior to making an interpretive intervention. Mrs Baranger spoke more generally. She spoke about the general principles that should guide an analyst while listening to a patient prior to making an interpretation. Her recommendations were based very largely on the concept that analysis consists in understanding and interpreting the nature of an interactional field that exists between patient and analyst and that can be properly described as a shared unconscious phantasy. Dr Duncan, like Dr Jacobs, illustrated the points he wished to make with clinical material from an analytic case. He started from the thesis that all of the current psychoanalytic theories of mental functioning have validity or, in other words, that psychoanalytic theory is at present pluralistic and properly so. The consequence is that, in practice, one uses them all, each in its proper place. Dr Duncan finds Kleinian theory useful in understanding some things, object-relations theory useful for others, self psychology for still others, and so on.
In arguing thus, it is evident that Dr Duncan introduced a new topic into the discussion, a topic much discussed in recent years. Is psychoanalytic theory properly pluralistic? Should we acc