Psychoanalysis: the common ground

This paper carries further the theme I developed in my presidential address in Montreal, 'One psychoanalysis or many?' where I discussed the issue of what holds us together as psychoanalysts sharing a common discipline and science despite our increasing theoretical diversity. My response was that our common ground rested in our shared clinical enterprise in our consulting rooms where we relate comparably to the immediacy of the transference-countertransference interplay with our patients. In this paper I reconsider these perspectives in the light of the specific responses to them, including in the six pre-published statements for the Rome Congress which was dedicated to this theme of exploring our common ground; and I then apply these conceptions in my own comparative assessment of the three plenary clinical presentations of the Rome Congress, drawn from the three major world regions of psychoanalytic activity and presented by adherents of three of the major metapsychological perspectives in our field, the ego psychological, the Kleinian, and the object relational.