Epilogue

The meal is over, and Andrade's cannibals, having tasted psychoanalytic fare, are now struck by the compulsion, novel and uncanny, to reflect on their experience. What can they take away from it? Or, cannibals ourselves, what can we take away from it?

I would like, first, to thank my contributors for the nourishment I have taken from editing this issue and invite the reader to the same feast. Finally allowing myself the opportunity to step back from the texts, I am amazed with the breadth and the depth of the knowledge, of the wisdom, I have taken in. A number of the contributors to this issue are my colleagues and friends from a time before I began this project, to whom I have grown closer. And I have gained new colleagues and made new friends as I have gone through the process of putting this issue together.

Each contributor is, to a lesser or greater degree, an outsider to my idiosyncratic take on clinical process. And in my own cannibalistic pursuit of their essence, I believe I have identified a flavor that runs through all the chapters. And I believe that if an analyst or therapist, however much an outsider, approached any of them with an illustration of good clinical work, they would take an interest. And so long as that work led to therapeutic action, they would, like all good cannibals, take off a bite big enough to chew and taste.

The articles here and in Part 1 speak for themselves. Little is to be gained by suggesting that any of the contributors should have thought or responded differently. The sole exception to this is my article devoted to a different way of thinking about Slochower's work with Karen. I hope the reader will visit my framework, as I hope the reader will visit all the frameworks presented. But I am less interested in a wholesale supplanting of other analytic orientations by my own than in wondering how analysts and therapists can and do learn from what their colleagues have written.

I believe that analysts and therapists can learn f