On January 6, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco, California, the American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Liaison with the AAAS presented a symposium entitled: “Psychoanalytic Self Psychology: A New Bridge to the Other Behavioral Sciences.” Presenters were Drs. Michael F. Basch, Mark J. Gehrie, Paul H. Ornstein, and Marian Tolpin. Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk served as discussant.

Dr. Gottschalk summarized the content of the symposium as follows: Freud sought to establish a general psychology and a theory of development based on his studies of neurotic conflict and the vicissitudes of aggressive and sexual drives. Revolutionary as his discoveries were, especially in the area of formulating a clinical method for the investigation of human motivation and goal-directed behavior, they have not attained the encompassing role of a general psychology. Heinz Kohut, using Freud's method of studying the transference of earlier hopes, wishes and fears unto the analyst in order to establish the manner in which the process of accommodation and assimilation took place in a given patient, discovered ubiquitous patterns for attachment and adaptation that had not been systematically studied previously. The development of the self or of narcissistic development as studied by self psychology can be seen to correlate with the findings of developmental psychologists using other methods than psychoanalysis to study infants and young children. It should be possible to eliminate the gap that has existed between psychoanalysis and other branches of psychology, the behavioral and social sciences, now that we can talk a common language.

The theme of the AAAS meeting was “Science: Our Common Heritage.”