Response to Ahumada

Dear Sirs,

I was dismayed that Professor Ahumada felt it necessary to register a public complaint about my review of the internet discussion of his paper ‘The rebirth of the idols’. To take the most generous point of view, his concerns seem to be based on multiple misreadings of my text.

Professor Ahumada would appear to be unable to distinguish between ‘postmodern rebuttal’ and honest-to-goodness intellectual disagreement with his views, as expressed by the vast majority of the contributors to the discussion. My review is an even-handed digest of the wide-ranging views of the twenty-eight contributors to the online discussion of his paper (forty-five contributions in all, including three of his own). As Professor Ahumada should know, since he presumably read all the online contributions, most of what he complains about reflects the views of others, which I simply summarised and reported. It would appear that he has forgotten the ancient plea not to shoot the messenger. Although he is free to feel that some of those contributors either misunderstood or failed to grasp the full intellectual force of his paper, I completely refute the charge that my review contains either distortions or inaccuracies.

As soon as the paper appeared on the web, I solicited online responses to it by writing to a wide range of colleagues worldwide and expressing my personal view that it was an important paper, dealing with worrying issues for the future of psychoanalysis in both the academy and the consulting room. As someone who divides his professional life between the academy and the consulting room, I was very happy to do what I could to generate a vigorous discussion of the issues raised by the paper. However, that should not imply an endorsement of the arguments presented in the paper. And surely Professor Ahumada would not wish the reviewer to be totally excluded from the subsequent discussion. While for the most part I confined myself to reflecting and summarising the views of the con