Renewal or retreat? Psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the crossroads

This conference has a narrative arc – an agenda – and that agenda clearly is not business as usual. It is my job at this point to offer an appraisal of where the psychoanalytic community is strategically, what its prospects are, and what we now have to put in place to face the future. The great thing about this conference is that it isn't all about the insuperable challenges and obstacles that psychoanalytic psychotherapy faces. It is, in very large part, about the enormous strengths and resources – intellectual and clinical – that we can bring to meeting the undeniably huge challenges that we now face.

To take the famous aphorism of Freud's friend and correspondent Romain Rolland, much quoted by Antonio Gramsci, ‘Pessimism of the intelligence; optimism of the will’, we need both pessimism and optimism – but, above all, realism – in our analysis of the current situation, together with a determined ‘optimism of the will’.

In the culture of the Yoruba-speaking peoples of West Africa, sacrifices are traditionally made at a crossroads, or at a point where several roads meet, in order to avert an impending calamity. The messenger of the gods Eshu-Elegba, a mischievous and creative spirit, presides over the crossroads: a disturbing and disconcerting place but also where one recognizes truth or makes life-changing decisions (Pemberton, 1975).

Many historians of the blues believe that the idea of Eshu-Elegba lies behind the legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical gifts (Palmer,1981). But the raw sound of Johnson's great song Cross Road Blues would make a resonant soundtrack for where the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic community finds itself today. The whole of this community – from psychoanalysts through to psychodynamic counsellors – is experiencing profound levels of anxiety – even pessimism – about the future.