Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Andrew Peto referred to Imre Hermann's conceptualization of clinging versus going-in-search as a contrasting instinctual pair. He also examined the relevance of Willi Hoffer's description of hand-mouth coordination and its relation to the earliest forms of ego integration. Dr. Peto then mentioned his own ideas about transient interruption of part-self and part-object representations and their relation to depressive tendencies, and feelings of depersonalization. Dr. Manuel Furer cast Dr. Friedman's contribution in the historical perspective of a gradual change of analytic emphasis from recovery of the past via remembering to its recovery from reliving or repeating in the transference instead of remembering, especially in regard to preverbal experiences which would not be recoverable directly in memory (Greenacre). He felt that Dr. Friedman placed emphasis on a reconstructed memory from preverbal times, which Dr. Friedman felt was uncontaminated with contributions from later developmental epochs. On the basis of our understanding of the multiple determination of symptoms, Dr. Furer felt that such lack of contamination is not likely. He discussed the potential advantages and disadvantages of such reconstructions, and was not fully satisfied that this particular reconstruction was required, given the case material presented. He provided two of his own case illustrations of the symptom of dizziness. The first revealed the defensive development of this symptom to express the patient's unconscious guilt at comparing herself favorably with her aged, infirm mother, as well as her fear of talion reprisal. The other case appeared to reflect a blend of displaced orgiastic fantasies with rage at an unsupportive and unnurturing mother. He felt that the explanation offered by Dr. Friedman could lead an analyst to neglect the determining unconscious instinctual fantasies of a patient and the conflicts arising therefrom. At the same time, he felt that the