Commentary

The conference leads me to conclude that intrapsychic and interpersonal no longer serve as banners under which opposing camps of Freudian traditionalists and Sullivanian revisionists rally followers. The duality between intrapsychic and interpersonal has been restated in a multiplicity of different forms, but the broad divergence of these two conceptual positions is never fully resolved. I conclude also that as each of the current forms given to this problem is laid out before us by the presenters, the lack of suitable data has been cited recurrently as a source of difficulty in working toward a resolution.

Gedo redefines the problem by placing character as the bridging concept between the intrapsychic and interpersonal realms of discourse. Character pathology refers simultaneously to maladaptive psychological structures (intrapsychic) and to overt behaviors produced by their activation, that is, by the individual's transactions with the environment (interpersonal). Enactments based on character interface the two realms. Gedo notes the polarization between theories that emphasize later (oedipal and postoedipal) development and those that emphasize early (preoedipal dyadic) development. Parallel is the polarization centering on the degree of influence of environmental input. Gedo warns that interpersonal transactions, enactments, and even well-observed transferences are at best an imperfect window to the historic intrapsychic developments; reading backward to specific stages is often a genetic fallacy. Having stated his cautionary message, Gedo makes his main point: one consequence of early