Introduction

‘Unless psychoanalysis is regarded as a closed system, incapable of extension, correction or development, its practitioners are bound to be confronted with new observations, which cannot always be satisfactorily accounted for with the help of existing psychoanalytic theories, and new hypotheses will be put forward to account for them’ (King 1981). This poses the question, How are they to be assessed and when should they be added to the general body of psychoanalytic knowledge and passed on to students?

During the years 1940 to 1946 the members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society were faced with this very question in relation to the findings of Mrs Melanie Klein and the theories she had developed from her findings and research. Was her work a continuation of psychoanalysis, the main lines of which had been first formulated by Sigmund Freud, or were her contributions based on such different assumptions that she could be considered as diverging from Freud's basic hypotheses enough for it to be said that she was founding another school of psychoanalysis, rather as Carl Jung had earlier?

Psychoanalysts are not alone in having to face and come to terms with the problem of how to incorporate new findings and theories into their understanding of their main body of knowledge. In any branch of learning, be it in the fields, for example, of science, medicine, sociology, literature, and even history, this problem will have to occur if that branch of knowledge is to develop and if research and scholarship is to be encouraged. Riccardo Steiner has discussed some of the difficulties in his paper on the ‘Controversial Discussions’ in which he places these psychoanalytic controversies