Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Harold P. Blum discussed the current proposals for changes of technique related to controversies surrounding developmental concepts, including the relative role of deficit and conflict. He spoke about those analysts who emphasize preoedipal conflicts and those analysts who address themselves to the centrality of oedipal conflicts even in cases of severe pathology. Dr. Blum also pointed out the importance of differentiating between arrest and regression and problems encountered in attempts to analyze deficit and to promote structural development. Dr. Simon Grolnick saw development as complex, circular, actually spiral, and not linear. He addressed himself to the controversy of whether analysis provides an opportunity for new developmental change. He saw the developmental process as continuously interweaving regressive, progressive, and adaptive factors at higher and higher symbolic and internalized levels throughout life. Dr. Melvin A. Scharfman referred to development as evolving from the interaction of biological potential and the environment. Where developmental lag exists, it may be that in the course of analysis interferences with that developmental process may be removed and the child may reach a new developmental level. In that context the analyst may be used by the child as a new object at a developmental level not previously achieved, but the analyst does nothing to promote that other than maintain an analytic stance.