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The Chairman introduced the panel by emphasising the importance of the theoretical issues raised by the topic. She noted that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory had created a dichotomy between reality and unconscious fantasy. While Freud's change of mind was critical to the birth of psychoanalytic thinking and to the recognition of the role of the unconscious, at the same time it tended to direct attention away from the role of pathogenic life events in the patient's conflicts.
While clinicians have never ignored the patient's life experience (and the role of trauma in psychological disturbance has been acknowledged to varying degrees), the emphasis (at least in ego-psychology) has been mainly on unconscious conflict or biological predisposition as the major determinants in such disturbance. She noted also that object-relations theorists, by contrast, had emphasised the profound impact on the child's psyche of the emotional exchanges that take place in the family.
Person felt that more recently, as a consequence of two significant developments in the United States, it had become legitimate to have a notion of the ‘cultural unconscious’. This referred to those things that each of us absorbed of necessity from our culture and that permeated our world view, thus co-existing and intersecting with the drives. The first of the two developments had been the influence of feminism, which had contributed to an increasing awareness that a good deal of what went into the psychological foundations of gender was there through cultural factors and the identifications made by the child. The other development related to the clinical issues surrounding childhood sexual abuse and post-traumatic reactions, which had reintroduced external reality in a major way into psychoanalysis in the United States.
The challenge for psychoanalysis was to consider and evaluate which of the different theoretical perspectives could more adequately account for the clinical phenomena encountered in