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Dr. Josselyn, in a few extremely condensed and intricately wrought paragraphs, presents the substance of what I hope will eventually be published as a major original paper. She starts from a different set of facts, reasons along different lines and reaches conclusions which, in my estimate, are fully compatible with mine and complement them in important ways. Such convergent discussions are a basic procedure in all sciences and especially necessary in psychoanalysis which deals with over-determined phenomena. I am grateful to her for having given me a fair hearing and for having used my paper in the manner in which I hoped it would be used.
Drs. Coodley and Ekstein adopt in their discussion a tone whose appropriateness for a scientific debate the reader may judge for himself. I do not propose to follow their example.
Underlying my argumentation is Freud's explicit statement that the instincts become monstrous only as a result of repression. This permits us to visualize the infant as a hungry wolf; we may not visualize him as a psychotic, ghoulish werewolf. He enjoys biting the nipple but does not know and does not care about its being human flesh. His actions do not imply that he dreams in the cradle of feasting on corpses at Dracula's wedding with a vampire. Drs. Coodley and Ekstein argue about as follows : Crawling is instinctual and matures into walking, running and (sometimes) into winning an Olympic race; this “proves” that the infant, in crawling, dreams of Olympic victories. Because I disagree with this—strictly culturalist!—conclusion, I am said to disagree also with the premise, which I would not dream of doing.