Epilogue

Some of the problems facing psychoanalysis in the nineties as well as some of the trends visible in the eighties can be discerned in the preceding pages. What is perhaps most notable, however, is the diversity of mood among our contributors. Weinshel and Renik view the decade with obvious approbation and especially appreciate the trend to a less doctrinaire approach. Their point finds immediate illustration in Meissner's willingness to employ more than a single model to explain clinical phenomena. Pulver makes a similar point in recognizing the increasing flexibility with which psychoanalysts apply their theory to clinical encounters. This general approval of what the eighties have wrought is bolstered by Etchegoyen's optimistic report from the southern hemisphere. And from across the ocean, Meares also sounds pleased with recent developments. Cooper, on the other hand, though he views theoretical pluralism with approval, anticipates difficulties in our maintaining our psychoanalytic identity as nonmedical psychoanalysis becomes the order of the day.

Three of our contributors, Wolf, Mitchell, and Stolorow have used the occasion to set forth their own ideas. Wolf rejects the idea of the analyst as an Olympian and urges, as a means of moving toward a more egalitarian view of the analytic situation, that we think in terms of analyst and analysand rather than of analyst and patient. Gedo, on the other hand, deplores what he sees as a descent by the analyst, if not from Olympus, at least from a humanistic height to a depth of crass materialism and mere technology. And Wallerstein, in advocating a revolution of sorts