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In introducing the panel, Ron Spielman stated the obvious, namely that ‘the Unconscious’ is not only the bedrock of our clinical work — it is the bedrock of our profession. This has been so since Freud's initially disturbing assertion to the world that ‘The ego is not master in its own house’ and has continued to disturb the world ever since.
The topic of this select panel was “Comparative Perspectives on the Unconscious in Clinical Work’ having of course to do with the dynamic unconscious … that ‘compartment’ of the human mind where the personality structure ‘resides’ — where past experience, accessible or not, is ‘stored’ and where the attitudes, values and motives of the more primitive aspects of each personality derive and find expression for their individual characteristics.
The theme of the Chicago IPA Congress was ‘Convergences and Divergences’. Spielman asserted that in the ‘psychoanalytic family’ there are no ‘convergences’ … only ‘divergences’ — or perhaps ‘re-convergences’. We have not ‘converged’ from basically different starting points. We all started in the same place: the Vienna-Berlin-Budapest origins of Freud and his close colleagues. So, we all derive basically from the same stock, but various ‘families of psychoanalytic ideas’ have ‘evolved’ in different locations around the world.
Given then, that we all ‘come from’ the same original family tree … and have migrated around the world in the same manner as the human species has migrated from its earliest origins in Africa, to be represented on every continent, our basic commonalities are what identify us as psychoanalysts — and our ‘differences’ are what identify us as belonging to one ‘psychoanalytic family’ or another. Thus, if we consider ideas about ‘the Unconscious’ to be the central trunk of our psychoanalytic family tree, various branches have diverged from that central trunk and developed different ‘approaches’ to this central concept.
Spielman introduced the three presenters as representing — a