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As this is the last Part of the International Journal for which I am responsible, I would like to end by indulging in some personal reflections. These remarks are prompted by some thoughts about what I now consider I have been trying to do for the past twelve years and where I think we still need to try to go.
For some time now it has been common to speak of psychoanalysis as a discipline in crisis. Those who use this term usually have in mind the difficulty some colleagues have in attracting patients or the reduction (at least in some centres) of applications for training. They may also be thinking of the assault on previously taken-for-granted psychoanalytic leadership and privilege that has emerged through competition from competing psychotherapeutic and psychiatric treatment approaches, governmental or quasi-governmental regulation or from competing intellectual disciplines. At the back of everyone's mind may be an uneasy awareness that these difficulties exist despite the fact that more and more people worldwide are seeking talking treatments loosely based on Freud's work.
Something is wrong. One way of looking at the problem is to consider that psychoanalysis has failed to transform its clinical achievements and its capacity to illuminate human subjective experience into a securely held and demonstrable set of propositions. It has struggled to be more than a set of opinions underpinned by dogma or ideology, and nowhere more than in those instances where psychoanalysts have found it impossible to agree on fundamentals themselves. This struggle has implications when we consider questions such as who can call themselves a psychoanalyst, what the difference is between a psychoanalyst and a psychotherapist, when a candidate is competent to practise, how we select training analysts and how we relate to other professions and branches of knowledge.
Personal experience and anecdote suggest to me that within our profession and within most schools and approaches there is a