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The Moderator's remarks recognised the positive significance of a Santiago Congress for the Chilean psychoanalytic community. Jimenez particularly emphasised the remarkable opening address presented to the Congress participants by Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, President of the Republic of Chile. He then introduced the four panellists in the order of their presentations; Sander Abend (paper read by Harry Smith), Jacqueline Amati Mehler, R. Horacio Etchegoyen and Otto Kernberg. The two-hour format for this panel precluded time for general discussion.
Abend first described the subjective experiences evoked in him while preparing his summary comments. He emphasised that his comments would reflect only his personal views and clarified that they would not represent the full complexity of current psychoanalytic thought in North America. Abend's view includes the developmental perspective on mental life. He privileges technique that attends closely to the analysis of transference and to the defence and superego contributions to conflict, including the instinctual wishes involved. Abend has increasingly developed respect for the role of countertransference in analysis, as well as for the complexities of non-verbal, interactive expressions of transference and countertransference in the analytic situation.
Abend believes that Freud's quantitative dimension only makes intuitive or theoretical sense in the realm of the loving and hating affective charges accompanying desire. He also thinks that our current theorising undervalues the significance of the role played by pleasurable affective experiences. Abend hypothesised that different classes of affects may actually constitute quite separate kinds of mental phenomena with different physiological bases.
Abend is sceptical of analysts who construct theories conceptualising the earliest stages of psychic development. He stands with those who would pay more attention to the emerging data from neuro-science and to defining the evidential cri