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.
The XIIth International Congress held in Chicago was an enjoyable experience for me. It was superbly organized by Peter Mudd and, except for the usual one or two papers which seemed to take a lot of words to say very little, the standard of papers was high.
Some of us had felt a bit wary about the title ‘The transcendent function: individual and collective aspects’, fearing that the ‘descendent’ aspect might get by-passed, but this was allowed in.
In the morning papers, I was most struck by the general convergence of ideas and references coming from the different countries and their organizations. In her review of the last Congress held in Paris, ( Journal of Analytical Psychology 35, 3, 1990) commented that ‘a creative development seemed to be on the move which made the Congress much less like the Tower of Babel’. This development has continued and at the Chicago Conference I felt we were no longer talking in different tongues and, although there are differences in attitudes, there is much more communication between us all. One non-analytic spouse was heard to say that at previous conferences he hadn't been able to understand any of it; this time he could understand most of it.
The morning papers got off to a good start with a lucid paper on ‘The transcendent function in the analytic encounter’ by Jef Dehing (Brussels). Among other notable papers were ‘The perverse and the transcendent’ by Ann Bedford Ulanov (New York), ‘Another degree of complexity’ by Aimé Agnel (Paris) and ‘Locating the transcendent: inference, rupture and irony’ by Polly Young-Eisendrath (West Chester). Hester Solomon (BAP, London) gave an interesting paper showing