Final Over View Panel

In opening this final panel the Chairman commented on the richness of the entire Congress. He invited each of the three presenters to offer their perspectives on the varied presentations and overall experience of this Congress. The first panellist, Elizabeth Tabak de Bianchedi, began her comments with a theme that characterised the succeeding two panellists, namely the near-impossibility of synthesising all that was said and done with 2,000 participants, five days of plenary sessions, additional panels and numerous other presentations. She decided to present the idea that this was a ‘polymorphic’ Congress. Certain aspects of sexuality were accentuated within the Congress while others were taken less clearly into account.

De Bianchedi went on to offer a range of meanings of polymorphism with respect to the Congress, including: the wealth of aesthetic and historical periods to be seen in Barcelona's architecture; the range of forty-two countries represented at this Congress; the use of four official languages at our meetings; the participation of both senior and junior members of the profession; the array of fields of study including philosophy, biology, analyses of adults, analyses of children, studies of teenagers and gay and lesbian analyses; the broad range of topics presented including types of analysis and psychotherapy of transvestites, of perversions, aspects of sexuality related to cultural variables and medical diagnostic considerations, debates about biological determinism, psychoanalytic dimensions, Darwinism and many other interrelated fields; the host of psychoanalytic theories considered, including Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Kohut, Kernberg and Reich as well as post-Freudian schools and working groups; the variety of terms considered, such as castration, sexuality, identity and gender as well as the even broader ones such as masculinity, femininity and gender; the many ways in which the papers themselves were disseminated; the multitude of new notions such