Psychoanalytic practice is characterized by the recognition of unconscious transferences and resistances, and of their agency as the self unfolds in analysis. The art of practicing analysis is inseparable from the art of unravelling the " transference neurosis " that appears in analysis. (The only " neurosis" that the analyst can know, according to Freud, is the " new artificial neurosis" manifested through the transference). The unravelling of transference becomes magnified in its long-term effects throughout society in those analysands who go on to themselves become analytic practitioners.

        The analysand's transferences and the analyst's motivations are both present from the outset of the experience, indeed, even before their first meeting. In that context, what then is the place of the diagnostic categories inherited from psychiatry ? With the processes of transference, resistance and phantasy determining the course of an analysis, the relationship of analytic process to diagnostic categorization is open to our current debates.

        Psychoanalysis overlaps in areas with the fields of psychiatry and psychology. How can we characterize an epistemologically autonomous field for clinical psychoanalysis that defines itself in its own clinical and theoretical terms, respecting but not being unduly determined by concepts imported from other disciplines ? And with our consideration of this central definition, with the relation of tekhnè (the art of the analysis) and épistêmê (knowledge) ever open, how can we distinguish variations of practice that stay within analytic principles from those that may subtly betray our basic psychoanalytic enterprise ?

        The transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge and skill from one generation to the next has inevitable problems resulting from the need to traverse both institutional and individual paths. The high expectation of standards for a school or institute (as formulated by freud in " The Question of Lay Analysis ") must be balanced by the core experience of a personal analysis, one inevitably individual. Each of these paths has its own specific relationship to the heritage of Freud and his successors, and each of these paths keeps its own standard of responsibility.

        Our ideal is to preserve the heritage of psychoanalytic concepts and to transmit their understanding both educationally and in each unique personal analysis. However, history has exposed the presence of serious challenges to our common goal, challenges sometimes clear but often subtle for dangerous long periods. Unresolved transferences too often distort analyses, warp educational institutions for purposes perpetuating power, and impinge on relations between colleagues. While perfection cannot be expected in an " impossible profession ", constant vigilance can minimize the transmission of unresolved conflicts from generation to generation. In our field as in ourselves, candid examination of subterranean conflicts offers us the greatest possibility of freedom.

        Consideration of historical experiences with the interacting influence between the analyst/analysand pair and the institution/student pair offers the opportunity for discovering ways to minimize non-psychoanalytic power distortions. How can true individual analysis and valid educational transmission reinforce each other ? How can the autonomy and independence attained in such a way be carried over to open and mutually respectful rapport between analysts, even when they are engaged in the inevitable debates of open inquiry?

        Psychoanalysis exists in both private and public universes. The markedly private world of the analytic situation involves analyst and analysand in a uniquely intimate engagement, one with its own internal realities whatever the transference and countertransference forces. The public world of psychoanalysis is that of analysts in groups, training institutions and societies where unfolding theories are debated, where social and political and unresolved groups dynamics are present.

        How might these more public and more private arenas inevitably influence each other (covertly or overtly) ? Is a cleavage between the two preferable or even possible ? How can each be protected from undue distortion from the influence of the other ? What guidelines might be inferred from experience that would optimize their correspondence ?

        What might be the future for such a co-responding state be for psychoanalysis ? How might improvements be applied to psychoanalytic institutions ? What might be the effects on the relations between analysts and their institutions, even the effects on the social bonds between the analysts themselves ?

        And centrally, how can such improved correspondences withstand the bias of sectarianism or of bureaucratic standardization while respecting differing currents of opinion that conform to psychoanalytic rigor and thus permeate the continuing growth of psychoanalytic knowledge ?

        Interactive effects of a patient's transference with the forces of the analytic situation within which it unfolds has long been studied. It now is similarly appropriate to consider the interactive influences of historically developing psychoanalysis with the social and political context within which it develops. As early views of the patient tended to neglect the mutual influence of analyst and patient on each other, so for long psychoanalysts considered analysis as a force apart from society 's influences on it, from its influences on society.

        Repeated experience has shown that supposedly detached disinterest in the affairs of society and politics has at times resulted in compromising both basic psychoanalytic principles and essential human rights. Presumably apolitical attitudes can cloak silent collaboration with destructive forces. On the other hand, moralistic and political passions have at times led analytic organizations and individuals to become active in ways that similarly compromised principles and rights.

        Using specifc past, recent, and current developments in struggles related to analysis and social pressures, even dictatorial forces, to understand these issues in actual experience, can we develop a model of ethical practice and of limits to ethically acceptable analytic practice ? Both sides of the equation merit examination. What forces lead to insidious, subtle, and even gross violations of ethical principles by analysts ? Also, what does analytic study have to contribute to understanding the pressures and movements of power in groups and in society. In other words, what can we define of the influence of politics on analysis and politics in analysis ; and what can we add to an analytic understanding of the play of power and politics in human life ?

        Consideration of the interplay of psychoanalysis, politics, and ethics leads to the added questions of how analytic practices may vary from country to country, from culture to culture. What are universal basic principles of analytic practice and the regulation of that practice, what are the limits to varying those principles with respect for varying mores ? And how can analysis protect itself and contribute to society in the face of progressive restriction of the private sphere ?

        The twentieth century has seen not only the growth of psychoanalysis but also the horrors of the holocaust and other organized efforts at genocide. Analytic concerns with parricide have been outpaced by the development of actual systematized crimes against humanity, crimes which threaten our very humanity, that threaten the possibility of mastery of drives, threaten even the development of psychic reality. Fundamental cruelty, seemingly free of restraints of conscience even while often masked by moralism, attempts to appropriate to itself ultimate, as if divine, authority. With spiritual pride, in the guise of moral superiority such empowered primitive aggressive forces attempt to protect themselves by destroying all witnesses. In their interchange, Freud and Einstein (1933) had already wished to submit this then still unnamed fundamental crime to a supranational jurisdiction.

        What is the place of psychoanalysis in the face of such forces ? Can clinical analysis take place in such a context, and if so how ? What is the place of psychoanalytic institutions in such circumstances ? How are psychoanalytic institutions at risk of corruption, how can they protect themselves from such forces, how can they guard even against the development of aspects of such forces within themselves ? How might all of this be related to the findings of neurosciences or to the place of law ? How does character relate to the subject of a neuronal system sensitive to experience of pain and pleasure, how to the elements of speech and writing, how to desire and law ? In what manner can modern advancements in molecular biology and genetics address these questions ? Do such advances require an alteration in psychoanalytic concepts of drive ? Conversely, what is the effect of the frequent exclusion of the subject of the unconscious from the field of sciences ? How can a place be kept for the humanism of humanity in the face of a spectrum of theories positing a computer-like chemically-tempered view of humanity ? What impact does the medical treatment of emotional symptoms have on the unfolding of a clinical analysis, on the development of a sense of self and other, on autonomy ?  How do these questions, like others present, fit into the ev everevolving struggle between individual autonomy and the pressures of group demands ? What does psychoanalysis have to contribute to understanding and mastering inevitable tension between individual freedom and law, to pathological tension when freedom is perverted to license or when law is perverted to domination ?