Communicating across Boundaries, Building Crosscultural Bridges

I am very grateful for the attentive reading that Rosemary H. Balsam and Ruth Imber have given my article. Their contributions broaden and enrich it. The questions they pose permit me to clarify my thinking, but they also indicate the necessity—and the possibility—of exchanges characterized by reciprocal curiosity.

I find the title of my response appropriate for some reflections inspired by my reading of these two commentaries. I have thus synthesized and articulated, in a spirit of hopefulness, what appears in their texts. Communicating across the boundaries of different psychoanalytic cultures and building crosscultural bridges represent ever-increasing necessities. The plurality of psychoanalyses (nowadays we can express it this way) has allowed us to greatly amplify our knowledge of the human being, of the role played by connections that one establishes or that one is incapable of establishing, of the continual necessity of thinking within groups and so of increasing our knowledge about group functioning. We could obviously add many things to this list.

Concerning ourselves with aspects of these phenomena, following intuitions and bringing them to their ultimate results, has led us to the current plurality of theories and different ways of practicing on the clinical level. It is a process in which affective components are active and sometimes determinative, just as our impression of confusion in the face of such a plurality is also charged with affects—an impression I believe we all feel about a plurality that has come into being, I would add, in a disjointed