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Looking back on the two presentations included in this report, what stands out foremost is the extreme diversity of responses of the panel participants to my introductory questions. Dr. Rittenberg gave a vignette illustrating the capacity for change in a reanalysis of a patient in his early seventies, who had been deemed unanalyzable by a previous analyst. Dr. Horowitz on the basis of reanalyses of some 20 cases illustrated the mechanism of a particular type of resistance in masochistic patients.
My introductory questions were thus engaged only variously by the panelists, and from this I infer that my aims were perhaps a bit too ambitious. Perhaps there is more disagreement about what constitutes character change and its assessment in analysis than I realized. Moreover, it seems that the concept of character is itself so broad that it is not easy to encompass in a relatively brief symposium panel without the risk of vagueness and ambiguity. For example, it is clear that Dr. Rittenberg is using the concept of character type in a much more restrictive and limiting fashion than Dr. Horowitz. The latter was quite comfortable in starting out with relatively abstract ideas, then illustrating them with brief clinical vignettes. One of the broad areas of character that the panel left relatively unexplored was the manifestations of character in the transference. In a case of my own, one of my patients has continued to seek me out periodically for the last 30 years after what appeared to be a largely successful analysis. The continued contact proved necessary to maintain a transference fantasy that he had not damaged me by his success and that like a good father I would be eternally present for him whenever he