The 35th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association took place at the Palais des Congres in Montreal from July 26th to July 31st. The Congress, held under the Presidency of Robert S. Wallerstein and under the auspices of the Canadian Analytic Society, was only the second IPA Congress to be held in the Western Hemisphere and the first to be held in Canada. Registrants from 31 countries made it the second largest Congress in IPA history.
At the opening ceremony on Sunday, July 26th, Dr. Eva Lester welcomed, on behalf of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, the almost 2,000 attendees gathered in the Palais des Congres. The gathering was also addressed by Claude Ryan, the Minister of Education of the Province of Quebec; Robert Wallerstein, President of the IPA; Otto Kernberg, Chairman of the Program Committee; Roger Dufresne, Chairman of the Organizing Committee; and Pierre Bois, President of the Medical Research Council of Canada. The outstanding efforts of these individuals, along with the efforts of Irene Auletta and Dorothy Unwin of the IPA Central Office, to make the Congress a success are herewith noted. This IPA Congress was administered entirely by the IPA Central Office without the assistance of a professional conference organizing firm, which is why I believe it was the best organized IPA Congress in memory. The scientific facilities were excellent and the social programs well planned and ably implemented. Of special note are the warm welcoming reception given by the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, which celebrated the 35th anniversary of its founding and the 30th anniversary of its status as a component society of the IPA, and the reception given by the IPA at the Palais de la Civilization on Notre Dame Island, including a visit to the special exhibition, “The Treasures of Thrace”.
Scientifically, the Congress was notable for the depth and breadth with which its theme—“Analysis Terminable and Interminable Fifty Years Later”—was considered. The Congress program provided an abstract of Freud's classic paper of 1937, prepared by Otto Kernberg. In addition, the English version of the first IPA educational mongraph, which contained discussions of “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” by a group of internationally eminent analysts, was distributed to all IPA members and associate members attending the Congress. These thoughtful preliminaries highlighted what was unique (and uniquely valuable) about this Congress: the opportunity it afforded analysts from different countries, working in different languages and bringing to bear different theoretical perspectives, to work with a single text.
The range of scholarly commentaries elicited at the Congress by Freud's late paper was anticipated by the three prepublished papers by Didier Anzieu (France), Isidoro Berenstein (Buenos Aires), and Harold Blum (Roslyn Estates, New York). And it was embodied well in the four plenary sessions and several half-day meetings that dealt with the Congress theme from different vantage points. But mainly it was the presidential address of Robert S. Wallerstein, “One Psychoanalysis or Many”, and the final plenary address by Joseph Sandler, “Final Overview of Technique in the Light of the Combined Analysis of all the Plenary Sessions”, that acknowledged and grappled with the challenge implicit in that theme.
Reviewing the history of dissidence in psychoanalysis, including, in the immediate aftermath of Freud's death,
the emergence of competing analytic traditions in Europe and the consolidation of a single “mainstream” tradition in America, Wallerstein submitted that, despite Freud's efforts to establish and perpetuate a single integrated perspective on his science, worldwide psychoanalysis today “consists of multiple (and divergent) theories of mental functioning, of development, of pathogenesis, of treatment, and of cure”. From this fact of professional life, he went on to pose two “formidable questions”. “The first question is what do these diverse theories all have in common that they are all recognizable psychoanalysis in terms of fundamentally shared assumptions? The second question is … what differentiates them together from all the other, the unpsychoanalytic theories of mental life, for surely not every psychology of human behavior is psychoanalytic…?”.
Wallerstein answered these questions by arguing, in the spirit of the 35th Congress, for a unity that encompasses theoretical diversity. Specifically, he submitted that the “shared definitional boundaries of psychoanalysis presented by Freud hav[e] to do with the facts of transference and of resistance; and, by Kris, as human behavior considered from the point of view of conflict”. Drawing upon Joseph and Anne-Marie Sandler's distinction between the past unconscious and the present unconscious, he argued that the clinical theory bearing on the present unconscious and guiding day-to-day therapeutic work encapsulates the unity among analysts. On the other hand, general theoretical perspectives that address the past unconscious, aiming at a more “causally developmental accounting of mental life from its earliest fathomable origins,” are the repository of the diversity among analysts. For Wallerstein, such broad perspectives (e.g., Kleinianism, object relations theory, self psychology) are metaphors—albeit scientifically necessary metaphors—“that we have created in order to satisfy our variously conditioned needs for closure and coherence and overall theoretical understanding”. It is owing to the difference between clinical theory addressing the present unconscious and general theory attempting to reconstruct the past unconscious, Wallerstein concluded, that contemporary psychoanalysis, as exemplified by the IPA, can combine “diversity of theoretical viewpoints and unity of clinical purpose and healing endeavor”. It was interesting to observe the considerable extent to which the various presentations at the 35th Congress, from large
plenary sessions to small workshops, reflected this condition of diversity within unity. Each plenary session consisted of a single theoretical presentation followed by a single clinical presentation and, as if to bear out Wallerstein's thesis, the plenary clinical papers generally elicited much greater agreement than the theoretical papers. Case presentations by Paul Lefebvre on psychosomatics, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel on perversion, and Anne-Marie Sandler on neurosis, in particular, elicited much admiration and little controversy.
Joseph Sandler's contribution at the final plenary session, “A Final Overview of Technique”, constituted a review and commentary of many of the major issues dealt with during the Congress. Sandler used Robert Emde's paper on “Development, Terminable and Interminable: Innate and Motivational Factors from Infancy” as a handle for discerning, in the spirit of Wallerstein's opening remarks, certain unifying clinical emphases that subsumed the theoretical divergences of Congress presenters. Emde suggested: “What may be formative about infant experience is not that the infant behavioral patterns get set in an enduring way, but that infantcaregiver relationship patterns get set in an enduring way.” Noting, in this spirit, the necessity of a “we” psychology to supplement a “self” psychology, Emde stressed (to quote Sandler's summary) the “regulatory and organizational role of affects, including pain and pleasure, or, as Freud put it, pleasure and unpleasure, as well as feelings associated with helplessness, depression, safety, self-esteem, and the like.” Emde pointed out the signal function of all these affects, and went on to question the ability of a theory of drives to encompass the range of affective experiences that enter into early development. Echoing a position that has gained expression in the recent literature, by Charles Brenner among others, he observed that “drive manifestations are usually thought of as wishes.”
For Sandler, it was a preference for clinical conceptualizations in terms of affect rather than drives that imparted unity to various case presentations otherwise embodying the theoretical pluralism of which Wallerstein spoke. Commenting on the prepublished paper of Didier Anzieu and the case presentations of Paul Lefebvre, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Cesar Garza Guerrero, Hermann Beland, and Anne-Marie Sandler, he found that in each case abstract conceptualizations in terms of drive vicissitudes gave way, in the actual conduct of analysis, to a primary emphasis on the patient's affects in the form of consistent interpretations about “unconscious feeling states”.
In turn, Sandler's endorsement of the view that affective rather than drive concepts represent the best way of describing patients' object relationships and transference led him to take issue with Dale Boesky's theoretical plenary paper, “Comments on the Structural Theory of Technique”. While sharing Dr. Boesky's views about the necessity of analyzing conflict, resistance, and transference, Sandler disputed Boesky's belief that conflict always involves drive derivatives and can be adequately formulated
in terms of structural theory: “We can no longer view our patients' conflicts as being essentially between drives and ego, nor can we pretend that the unconscious conflictual wishes of our patients are always instinctual ones. Intense conflict-inducing wishes can be stimulated, for example, by the peremptory urge to deal with unpleasure, with narcissistic hurt, by trying to impose a past defensive solution or by attempting to actualize a reassuring fantasy involving a specific self-object relationship. To call such a peremptory wish an instinctual urge … can have a distorting effect on our understanding and interpretation of our patients' material.”
Sandler returned to Wallerstein's concern about the relationship of clinical theory to general theory in commenting on Boesky's belief that a theory of technique should have a “demonstrable articulation with its superordinate model”, so that there is a “reciprocal coherence between theory and technique.” For Sandler, such “articulation” does not mean that theory of technique and general theory are identical, and he referred to his oft-stated view that “the implicit, preconscious overlapping but not fully integrated models used by the analyst in practice do not necessarily correspond with the analyst's ‘official’ or ‘public’ version of psychoanalytic theory, or even his ‘public’ theory of technique.” Referring to Emde's presentation, Sandler suggested that the “reciprocal coherence” between general theory and theory of technique was analogous to the relationship between the infant and its caregiver: “Each interacts with the other and each contributes to the development of the other. There is a mutuality between the two rather than a fusion, symbiosis, or absence of boundaries.” This position, be it noted, falls midway between those of Boesky and Wallerstein. Like Boesky, that is, Sandler holds that the analyst's theory of technique must have a “demonstrable articulation” with “superordinate” psychoanalytic theory. But, in the spirit of Wallerstein, he submitted that the “two are by no means identical”, adding that “implicit preconscious” and not “fully integrated” models guide the analyst in his day-to-day clinical work—and by inference provide the unity that subtends the theoretical differences among analysts throughout the world. In fact, having reviewed the major Congress presentations, Sandler ended on a note that very much echoed Wallerstein's opening remarks: “What stands out, however, are the discrepancies between our general theory on the one hand and the other implicit experience-near theories we derive from our work and our observations of the other.”
With these closing remarks, Sandler touched on the issue that was integral to the 35th Congress, both explicitly, as a feature of the plenary format (a theoretical paper followed by a clinical paper), and implicitly, as the latent agenda of most of the deliberations. I refer to the clinical relevance of psychoanalytic theory or, put in the obverse, the theoretical implications of psychoanalytic data. It may be owing to the timeliness of this issue, and the way in which the plenary format brought it to the fore, that the 35th Congress generated an excitement rare in psychoanalytic conferences. Each day, a theoretical paper and a clinical paper “played off” each other, and, from day to day, there were point and counterpoint interactions among the respective sets of plenary presentations. Finally, there was a logical, sequential relationship among Wallerstein's introductory remarks, the plenary papers that followed, and Sandler's summation, this final presentation returning full circle to the very issues with which Wallerstein had opened the Congress. Inevitably, more questions were raised than were answered. Discussions of psychoanalytic theory at psychoanalytic congresses often seem, in themselves, interminable. But such congresses do have successful terminations. What should be interminable in the aftermath of such stimulating exchanges are our continuing efforts to expand our clinical knowledge and refine our theoretical formulations. In respect of these life-long tasks, the attendees of the 35th IPA Congress undoubtedly found their time very well spent.