Tradition and Truth
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPTo the Editor:
We have noticed the following in an article by Hanna Segal in the Fall 2006 issue of American Imago:
After those discussions, the British Society had a curriculum in which both trends were taught. Some parts of the curriculum were joint and some, mainly technical, were taught separately. The balance was kept by what was then called the Middle Group. In further developments, the Middle Group, which changed its name to the Independents, also established a new model of the mind, deriving from Ferenczi and developed by Balint, Winnicott, and, later in the United States, by Kohut. The fundamental difference between this model and those of Freud, Klein, and their followers lay not in the fact that it took into account new clinical evidence, but rather in the kinds of uses that it made of clinical evidence. A new concern emerged that focused on various notions of cure and change that did not rest on attaining truth and that considered the personal influences of the analyst—e.g., his support, advice, and comfort—to be integral to the analytic process. Here the changes in technique were of a kind that made them essentially nonanalytic. They went against the psychoanalytic effort to bring about change through the search for truth. For when the analyst actively takes upon himself the parental role, he invites the patient to live in a lie. This in turn promotes concrete functioning rather than symbolization and psychic growth.
(288–89)
It is dispiriting to come across such statements about colleagues, especially when the British Psychoanalytical Society [End Page 121] is trying to put behind it the divisions and disparagements of the past and has made a fresh commitment to its tradition of pluralism. Dr. Segal's description of the British Independent Group's clinical and theoretical practices is inaccurate and does not reflect the way Independent psychoanalysts work.
Dr. Segal provides no grounds for her comments. She does not base them on any sort of scientific discussion. She does not specify what writings or clinical work she is referring to. As they stand, her comments are simply unsubstantiated defamation of the work of a particular, named, group of her colleagues.
We call on Dr. Segal to apologize for this unfounded attack on her colleagues' reputations and on a significant area of psychoanalysis itself. A copy of this letter has been sent to the British Psychoanalytical Society Bulletin.
Stella Ambache
Barbie Antonis
Bernard Barnett
Susan Budd
Patrick Casement
Rosemary Davies
Felicity Dirmeik
Sira Dermen
Sara Flanders
Denis Flynn
Andre Green
Anne Harrison
Earl Hopper
Judith Issroff
Brian Jacobs
Angela Joyce
Pearl King
Leon Kleimberg
Ralph Layland
David Leibel
Susan Loden
Ruth McCall
Baljeet Mehra
Juliet Mitchell
Kannan Navaratnem
Marianne Parsons
Michael Parsons
Ken Robinson
Ruth Robinson
Luis Rodriguez de la Sierra
Edgard Sanchez
Anne-Marie Sandler
Judit Szekacs
Joan Schachter
Tamar Schonfield
Beate Schumacher
Michael Sinason
Jonathan Sklar
Sharon Stekelman
Neville Symington
Helen Taylor Robinson
Margret Tonnesmann
Mary Twyman
Cindy Williams
Paul Williams
Inge Wise
Elizabeth Wolf
Ken Wright
Jessica Yakeley
Marie Zaphiriou Woods
The above signatories are all Members or Honorary Members of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
To the Editor:
We have become aware of the article by Hanna Segal, "Reflections on Truth, Tradition, and the Psychoanalytic Tradition of Truth," in the Fall 2006 issue of American Imago, and also aware of the response to part of this article from our colleagues. We would agree with our colleagues' point that her comments about the role of the Independent psychoanalytic tradition in the British Psychoanalytical Society are not backed up by any proper evidence.
In our view, Dr. Segal makes sweeping generalizations about what is and what is not "psychoanalytic." Leaving aside the question as to whether or not she has caricatured Independent technique, we disagree with the idea that being supportive, or offering advice or comfort to patients, is necessarily anti-analytic and necessarily a hindrance to attaining "truth" about psychic reality. Elsewhere in the article, Dr. Segal defines Freud's parameters for the psychoanalytic...
