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This panel addressed issues faced by psychoanalysis, and by psychoanalysts representing it, across different interfaces. This decidedly important area has not always received its fair share of attention in psychoanalytic discourse. In his opening remarks, Claudio Eizirik attributed this to the developmental decades in which psychoanalysis favoured internal growth and clinical refinement at the expense of dialogue with other areas. This has shifted recently towards greater exchange and contact with ‘the outside world’. There is growing dialogue with a number of neighbouring disciplines and with the culture at large. There is even room for hope with regard to medicine and psychiatry, promoted by the renewed interest in neuroscience. The IPA's Committee on Psychoanalysis and Society (CPS), established in 1997, has studied, consulted and contributed to interfaces with other areas. Members of this panel, all former CPS co-chairs in their respective continents, are actively involved and currently knowledgeable.
Ricardo Bernardi tackled the relationship between a ‘core’ and its ‘border’. The outer world is always present with the patient on the couch, and in the analytic sensitivity to the relationship between inner and outer worlds. These relationships can be elaborated along several dynamic borders. The first is the professional, in which psychoanalysis faces dilemmas vis-à-vis other professions. We need to define our academic and professional identity, which impacts on what separates as well as connects us with other academic and professional communities.
The second dynamic boundary is culture. The dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas has been accompanied by their trivialisation. Psychoanalytic ideas have been embedded in many intellectual fields. Bernardi advocates dialogue with the intellectual community that stems from dialogue with our own philosophical and ideological underpinnings. Unacknowledged assumptions of this nature are at the root of many clinical and theor