Introduction

Try browsing in this book. Possibly start with an Author's Response. Or pick any discussant you find interesting. Read what he has to say. See then if you wish to read how the author responds to the criticism. Then perhaps with quickened interest you will want to read the essay which is being discussed.

This is the experience with previous volumes which many readers, both scientists and laymen, have reported to us. Some of our colleagues have confessed that they never would have read some essay we published because “it represented thinking I just don't agree with.” Rather, they confide, they had eagerly turned first to the discussion remarks of someone they knew shared their poor opinion of the author's ideas, and vicariously enjoyed his demolishment. Then they raced on to read the Author's Response “to see how the poor so-and-so would try to squirm his way out of that”; and to a mixture of dismay, admiration, disappointment, and intrigue, found that the author had dealt head-on with the apparently devastating criticisms, that there was not, after all, an unbridgeable chasm separating the ideas. Now, openmindedly, they turned to read the controversial thesis in question.

This pleased us beyond belief! It was as if our fantasies, spoken and secret, from the time of conception of The Forum were now coming true, for this has been our aim from the very beginning.

So—browse. Please!

For appetizers try these excerpts from some of the authors' responses in this, Volume 5 of The Psychoanalytic Forum:

… I would suggest today that the therapist's anxiety lest the patient murder him is likely to be based … also upon some increment of an unconscious longing on the therapist's part to be murdered by the patient.

Page v

… I experienced fear in response to each of the three patients described at length in this paper, and I reassert the importance of the therapist's projection upon the patient of [his] unconscious—and to me quite understandable, under the circumstances—murderous feeling.

… I a