Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Most of the discussants felt that to attribute anxiety to the id was to confuse the id, a psychological structure, with the organic substrate or body

of the individual; also, to equate the id and the instinctually patterned responses of the ethologists was to confuse the psychological drives of the id with the biological responses of animals, a distinction that both Freud and the ethologists made explicit. Dr. Charles Fisher stated that his own work in perception indicated that the ego rather than the id was capable of unconscious perception and response, in keeping with the characteristics of primary process thinking. Dr. Edith Jacobson felt Freud had resolved the confusion of postulating two kinds of anxiety by relating them genetically in the same manner as Dr. Schur. She thought dread of the sexual drives was best explained by their violent, primitive nature in the child rather than on phylogenetic grounds. Dr. Robert Bak thought anxiety did not occur in response to the sexual drive as such but in response to the aggressive drive which can become so readily intermingled and confused with it. Dr. Charles Brenner believed the occurrence of anxiety was best explained by Freud's idea that it occurred in the face of excessive instinctual tension, whether this was sexual or aggressive. Dr. David Rubinfine thought anxiety could not occur before threat of object loss, which in turn could not occur until self had become differentiated from object and ego differentiated from id. Dr. Victor Rosen, after emphasizing the differences between the id drives and the instinctual responses of the ethologists, welcomed any ideas from Dr. Schur as to the relationship between the id and its organic substructure. He asked whether learning might not first appear in the evolutionary scale, when the nervous system first becomes capable of representing itself as well as external objects. Dr. Leo Spiegel, in questioning whether inner danger ever becomes replaced by