Discussion

I was very pleased when Sydney Pulver (1987) invited me to participate in a panel on “The Relationship of Models of the Mind to Clinical Work” which he was organizing for the May 1985 Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I very much enjoyed my work as a psychoanalytic practitioner. I was grateful for the excellent training I had received at the Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center, and I had been able to help a good number of people through what I had learned there. I was ever ready both to give something back for what I had received and to avail myself of the opportunity to learn more from my analytic colleagues. I was well aware that psychoanalytic theory and practice are and always will be imperfect, that I and my fellow psychoanalysts are human beings so that we too are and always will be imperfect, and that free and open exchange of ideas among inquiring and thoughtful psychoanalysts is vital for the discipline to grow and evolve and for individual practitioners to continually improve and develop their skills.

Human psychology is extraordinarily complex; psychoanalytic work is challenging; and there is always more to learn. As I stated at the close of my response to the other participants in the expanded