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When one undertakes the review of a key psychoanalytic topic or concept one is struck by how complex the task invariably turns out to be. The amount of “unpacking” to be done—to borrow a phrase from Spence (1982)—is, to say the least, daunting; the meanings, shades of meanings, and possibilities that present themselves and need to be accounted for, just keep unrolling and seemingly go on and on. As with an individual analysis, the place where one decides to stop is in a sense arbitrary and a matter of convenience. One could certainly go further.
I had this sense very much in dealing with the topic under consideration here. The eight papers in this issue are rich and varied in content, yet in conclusion one can say that their number easily could have been doubled. Clearly, there is more that each author—ot other authors—would have chosen to say, given the opportunity. At the same time, it is remarkable how much consensus exists among the various contributors. We note differences in emphasis and some differences in terminology rather than outright disagreements.
Historically, as both Cooper and Meissner indicate, change has been a central concern of analysts since the beginning of the analytic enterprise. Initially, the focus was on symptom removal, although already by 1913 the notion of “transference cure” (Freud, 1913) as opposed to “true” analytic resolution, entered the literature. With the development of the structural theory (Freud, 1923, Hartmann, 1939), the emphasis on change as structural change became both clearer and dominant. As Werman points out, the focus also shifted from primarily clinical to primarily metapsychological considerations, although clinical changes have always been required for making metapsychological inferences.