Endnotes

When Warren Colman first asked me to give the endnotes for the JAP Conference in San Francisco, I accepted without thinking about it too much. Actually, it has proved to be quite a challenging task. Listening to presentations is of course a highly subjective experience especially when difficult choices have to be made as to whether to attend the papers of UK friends and colleagues or rather those of colleagues with whose work I am less familiar. Then, knowing there is a task to be accomplished for the Endnotes at the very end of the conference, a particular style of focused concentration is demanded, rather than the more comfortable, open listening stance of imaginative engagement with the presenter without the requirement to think coherently in order to make a presentation.

The five plenary sessions were a shared experience for all at the conference: John Beebe's highly original paper on ‘Psychotherapy in the aesthetic attitude’; Toshio Kawai's research into ‘Union and separation in the therapy of developmental disorders’; JoAnn Culbert-Koehn's moving and personal paper on ‘Staying alive through living art: birth and rebirth’; the lively and interesting plenary panel on ‘Problems of symbolization in children and adolescents’ from Gustav Bovensiepen, Linda Carter and Marica Rytovaara; and finally a stimulating and controversial panel on ‘The transcendent function in society’ from Tom Singer, Betty Meador and Andrew Samuels. I attended all the plenary presentations and also a number of papers from the parallel sessions.

I am not going to review individual papers but I would like to say something about my impressions gathered from my experience of this conference-personal of course. But first of all, let me quote from the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (1993, p. 143):

When the dialogue begins the tempo slows down to the pace of the story itself. The reader understands very well that he is being drawn close in. He (she) too is relieved to hear what the voices are li