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The Chairman opened the panel with some questions about the role of beliefs in mental life: how does a person acquire beliefs about himself and the relational world? How central are beliefs that are pathogenic, causing maladaptation and psychopathology? Are pathogenic beliefs themselves the cause of psychopathology, or are they epiphenomena, the product of other psychic forces? What is their relation to wishes, fantasies and defences on the one hand, and external reality on the other? How do maladaptive beliefs change in psychoanalysis?
The first panellist, Joseph Weiss, arguing for the centrality of beliefs in psychic reality, suggested that the individual was highly motivated from the beginning of life to develop a reliable system of beliefs concerning the world, and particularly the people around him. These beliefs might be conscious or unconscious and they served as a guide to the expectable behaviour of the objects upon whom he depended for security. They were adaptive, even essential for survival. Pathogenic beliefs also arose in the service of adaptation, but while they served the individual adequately as a guide to his unique early experiences, they proved maladaptive later in development. Once established, he continued, beliefs became the central organisers of mental life, shaping strivings, affects, moods and behaviour.
Weiss emphasised the importance of external reality in the development of beliefs, arguing that the child developed a map of his objects based on his real experiences with them and developed maladaptive or pathogenic beliefs by inference from traumatic experiences with parents and siblings or learnt them directly from parental teaching. Weiss drew a clear distinction between beliefs and fantasies, arguing that beliefs were more fundamental than fantasies because they guaranteed survival.
Weiss argued that the concept of pathogenic belief could be used to explain behaviour that had in the past been explained in terms of primary unconscious impu