Dear Sirs,

We are grateful to Professor Szecsödy for his thoughtful and detailed response to our paper. We are in full agreement with him that we must constantly monitor the culture of psychoanalytic education for evidence of the cult of the ‘ideal psychoanalytic personality’. It is our continued hope that promoting an academic culture which rewards scholarship, critical enquiry and research rather than only identification with one's idealised elders will contribute to the ongoing task that he so cogently delineates.