Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Joseph T. Coltrera questioned Dr. Grolnick's confidence in a progressive dialectic leading to a new synthesis of psychoanalytic theories. He also questioned Dr. Grolnick's view of the Renaissance as a historical parallel, citing political factors as outweighing any rational dialectic in determining the historically ascendant point of view. Dr. Coltrera directed attention instead to the nineteenth century "and its central philosophical concerns for language and meaning." He outlined the development of the notion of "mind as an enduring psychic structure whose categorical imperative is to impose meaning on its experience of a unique self and its object world." He pointed out the methodological problem entailed in the concept of the self as both structure and process. A similar "conceptual embarrassment" was resolved by Freud in his "metapsychological papers": Freud proposed the drive-wish as the cognate form of the instinctual drive. Thereafter, drive-wishes became validly interpretable on the conceptual order of meaning rather than on the disparate order of force, a valid connection thus having been made "within the unconscious" between an instinctual drive and an idea. This metapsychological formulation has been continued in modern ego psychology's emphasis on the synthetic functions of the ego and has direct implications for modern notions of interpretation and reconstruction. Dr. Coltrera concluded that a clear theoretical view of narcissism and of the self was not achieved by Freud largely because of his overriding concern with the necessity of first clarifying the concept of psychic structure. Thus, the distinction between self and ego had to await the contributions of Hartmann and Jacobson. The concepts of other "self theorists," Kohut for example, were described by Dr. Coltrera as comprising a theory of the self and of the analytic process which is outside "the bounds of the conceptual parsimonies of the psychoanalytic idea" and thu