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The meetings of the first Franco-American Encounter in Paris in 1983 started with possible confusion arising from the discomfort of confronting one's usual vantage point with strange ways of approaching analytic questions. Despite the presence of both subtle and substantial differences in basic conceptualizations, participants from each side of the Atlantic came to recognize a commonality of clinical and theoretical concerns. The need to stretch beyond oneself to understand the ideas of foreign colleagues is an exercise too easily avoided.
The French contributors to this volume have addressed questions of analytic theory and practice already under scrutiny by Americans. Yet the effort to follow a different turn of mind, a strange way of thought or fashion of speech, is repaid by more than new insights into ideas of others; it also brings a fresh grasp of one's own thinking, which at times may be left too long unquestioned.
The authors included in this issue have struggled with understanding the nature of transference, of relations of love and hate, of the implications of otherness; the role of words and signifiers in analysis; the vicissitudes of sexuality and aggression; the manifestations of oedipal subtleties in the analytic process. The interests of American psychoanalysts are the same.
Attention to the French authors adds to our knowledge their advances. But just as valuable is the way they enable us to step back from our own frames of reference and to view our own attitudes in a new light.