Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Harvey Bezahler characterized Dr. Ross's ideas as challenging and evocative, but concluded that his thesis was not adequately supported by his case material. Dr. Bezahler underscored Dr. Ross's emphasis on the place of exhibitionistic wishes and their relevance to the analyst's work with children and adults. He also cited the importance of Dr. Ross's linking the fathers non-sexual gaze with

the daughter's subsequent ability to escape the mother. Dr. Ross's paper, however, had provided insufficient clinical data to substantiate this intriguing idea. Rather, Dr. Ross had relied on an interpretation of the Dora paper as primary evidence. Dr. Bezahler dissented from Dr. Ross's choice; he asserted that Dr. Ross assumed more than can be drawn from Freud's own account of the case.

Dr. Anna Burton described Dr. Ross's paper as "literate, sometimes beautiful," but she disagreed with the stance of the paper. Dr. Ross had opened with a strong theme, dramatized in King Lear—that of "the father seeking in the daughter a return of the mother of his own infancy, the child as mother to the father." However, Dr. Ross had subsequently dropped this idea. Dr. Burton noted that he had overlooked Dr. Jules Glenn's work on Freud's unanalyzed tie to his own earliest caretaker, a nursemaid, a "blind spot" that had contributed to his countertransference problems in the Dora case. In contrast, Dr. Burton argued, Dr. Ross overemphasized the importance of the father's gaze to the daughter's development in the "eye-vulva" dialogue. Looking and being looked at, in Dr. Burton's view, is not a central function in separation-individuation. This visual dialogue occurs in other phases as well and with other family members (grandparents, siblings). Questioning the developmental importance of this "seeing-being seen" interaction, Dr. Burton also dissented from the author's belief that "a woman's desire to be admired by a man is at the core of her heterosexuality." Like Dr.