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I would like to express my appreciation to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for organizing a forum where papers written by analysts from one part of the international psychoanalytic community are discussed by analysts from other parts. I had suspected that such discussions would manifest a phenomenon analogous to what Darwin (1859, Chapters 11, 12) described as the origin of new species promoted by geographical isolation. Indeed, there does appear to be the formation of more or less geographically isolated psychoanalytic communities, all adhering to and deriving from the works of Sigmund Freud, but nevertheless actively evolving their own distinct terminological, theoretical and technical particularities. They are influenced to widely varying degrees by the local intellectual, social or national ambience and/or the personal authority of one or more local psychoanalytic teacher(s). (Ludwik Fleck (1979), the sociologist of science, would term these psychoanalytic communities ‘thought collectives’.) This intellectual isolation in our profession sometimes obtains to such a degree that differences in definitions, standards of evidence, and conceptions of psychoanalytic treatment make communication among separated psychoanalytic communities very difficult, if not impossible.
This then was my anxious anticipation about discussing a recently-translated 1970 paper by Dr. Hermann Argelander who was then at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. My own very local psychoanalytic ‘ecology’ pivots around American ego psychology, and particularly that of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society with its own specific accents and preoccupations. My anxieties were markedly ameliorated when I realized that Argelander happily based most of his argument on many luminaries of American ego psychology. I presume this is what Werner Bohleber means, in his Introduction to Argelander's paper, where he states: “However, Argelander's thinking always preserved its links to