You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is based on a very stormy meeting held at University College, London, on November 1, 1997, between André Green and Daniel Stern, under the chairmanship of Joseph Sandler. Several discussants, including Anne Alvarez, Rosine Perelberg, and Irma Brenman Pick, comment on the two main position papers, with further replies by the main speakers.
Ricardo Steiner, in his thoroughgoing introduction, informs us that the wish to discuss the pros and cons of what Freud called “the cooperation of the two methods,” that is, the clinical method and the research method, was the main reason that lay behind organizing such a meeting. The edited proceedings of that conference are reproduced in Part II of the monograph; a preliminary debate, which was first published in the International Psychoanalytical Association Newsletter, is presented in Part I.
Due to his death in October 1998, Joseph Sandler never completed this monograph on the debate over the role of infant research and all empirical research to psychoanalysis. The book is dedicated to Sandler as a fitting completion of the work he had begun.
The two points of view represented in the debate are very different ways of understanding and interpreting psychoanalysis as well as what it means to be a psychoanalyst today. They bring into strong focus the issues of how to evaluate and use empirical research, including infant observation research, in the psychoanalytic endeavor.
Steiner spells out vividly the differences in the two points of view. André Green defends Freud's clinical and metapsychological views, particularly the drive theory. The superordinate concept for him is that of “après coup,” Freud's “nachtraglichkeit” or deferred action. This theoretical notion does not allow for any event experienced in the life of the infant to be considered