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This slim volume is the transcript of a panel commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute. Its stated theme was the way in which theoretical perspectives inform clinical work. The editors “reconvened” the panel in written form to allow for additional cycles of dialogue, thereby hoping to provide “the panel one always wishes to attend: one where there is plenty of time for discussion and panelists thoughtfully address each others' ideas and queries” (p. 139).
Is this book the satisfying panel we have always wanted? By my reading, the editors gave us both more and less than they intended. The title they chose portends the discussion: it is overly wordy and promises more than it delivers. A subtitle might have been “The good and the bad about how analysts (and editors who are analysts) think.”
The editors wanted to avoid a typical frustration in panel discussions, where panelists talk past one another while the audience senses a potentially enlightening debate that never comes to pass. Here panelists engage each other at length through commentary and direct questioning. The questions and answers are less than fully satisfying, however, because the answers, provided in the middle section of the book in narrative form, are separated from the questions, which are reproduced in an appendix. The interested reader has to work to piece together the two sections. In this and other important ways, the editors did not provide a format to allow for a systematic comparison of views. The panelists try to pin each other down in their questions, but these efforts yield haphazard results. In the end, I had the usual panel experience: all the delights, seductions, and frustrations of one protracted schmooze.
I found this book worth studying in spite of the rambling format. Three hours are presented from a negative transference phase