Chapter 4 The Sorrento Experience: Chaos Replaced by Too Much Structure

In Chapter 3, Tomas Böhm described the 2002 EPF Conference in Prague. He concluded that several difficulties had interfered with the basic aim of the workshops, which was to find ways of describing and comparing different ways of working psychoanalytically. These difficulties included confusion about the task, including a lack of tools for listening to and describing an analyst’s work, the tendency to focus on the patient and to adopt a supervisory position rather than to try to understand the presenter’s way of doing psychoanalysis - and thus also to try to leave aside one’s own favoured theories and models. Böhm did, however, note the participants’ interest in and enthusiasm for the project, and suggested that to move forward future groups would require a clearer sense of the purpose and the method they were using.

The Prague experience gave the members of what was then the Working Party on Clinical Issues much food for thought,1 especially on how best to proceed with the project: would it be possible to find a way of organizing discussion in the groups so as to focus on the task of describing and comparing analysts’ modes of working, thereby lessening

the difficulties of Prague? The discussions that followed split the working party into two ‘tracks’, both of which had the same starting point and the same end point or aim: to study experienced and competent psychoanalysts’ actual ways of working while understanding their differences and respecting them as such. However, the proposed methods to reach this end point differed. As described in Chapter 1 and the Appendix, Track 1 (chaired by David Tuckett) was based on a decision to address the problems in Prague by being more structured. To achieve this, we would first have to construct a typology of th