Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION. Dr. Sibylle K. Escalona noted a historical relationship and mutual influence between greater emphasis on ego problems in psychoanalysis and experimental work on perception and cognition: such studies of ego functioning facilitate a more controlled and systematic approach to problems of psychoanalytic theory, as they potentially increase knowledge of the ego mechanisms involved. In view of the reported sex differences and of the adaptive values of the ability to take clues from the environment, she questioned any tendency to assume a high positive correlation of degree of field independence and degree of maturity. Dr. Sidney Tarachow observed that the neurological factors involved in the righting reflexes, both visual (cortical) and labyrinthine-tonic (brainstem) require control before psychological inferences can properly be drawn. He gave examples of the care necessary in matters of definition and evaluation, particularly the requirement to conceptualize the experimental group dynamically which requires a psychoanalytic approach, as classification by tests may overlook dynamic problems: it is more difficult to assess intrinsic personality qualities of an instinctual nature than to measure ego 'style' and defenses. He suggested that