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Attending an International Congress after some years of absence gave me the feeling of having plunged myself into some strange and unfamiliar mêlée. Only gradually did I become accustomed to the confusion I remembered from earlier occasions brought about by the expanse and depth of the Jungian scene, and was able to take a selective view of the variety of papers presented: Some of them began to act as indicators of significant movements within the congress, Judith Hubback's, for example, on change, at first embedded in, and then developing out of, the analytic relationship, which set the scene for the congress. Change seemed to be taking place everywhere and in a far more fluid way than I had experienced at previous congresses.
I was surprised and delighted to discover, like Peter Mudd and Murray Stein in Berlin, that some of us seemed able to listen to each other in a more fruitful way, as if we had begun to think for ourselves, taking Jung's wealth of ideas as a starting point. A creative development seemed to be on the move, which made this congress much less like the towers of Babel that I had encountered on previous occasions. For newly-trained analysts and trainees the changing scenes in the theatre of international analytical psychology, which they met with for the first time, along with the variety of styles and viewpoints about practice, can come as something of a cultural shock. But we need our cross-cultural groups like Paris/London, Berlin/Switzerland, and the American Inter-Regional group to enable analysts to share and fertilise each other's ideas.
Some of papers acted as powerful bridges between our different cultures—for instance, those by Peter Mudd and Nathan Schwartz-Salant, which developed a rich theoretical range of ideas encompassing Jung, Klein and Fordham. Geneviève Guy Gillet's elegant paper explored the subtle, inner themes of transference/countertransference inspired by the alchemical image of the ‘Immersion in the bath’ taken from the Rosar