ABSTRACT
The success of the conference should be credited to the participants’ willingness to reveal their emotional responses, which was facilitated by a forum conducive to the free exchange of ideas and the absence of an audience other than the participants themselves. The autobiographical papers of the participants had been circulated in advance and provided the necessary background information for the discussions that took place. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue, the participants extended their thinking beyond the boundaries of their own discipline in an effort to understand and explore perceptions that cannot be accommodated within familiar schemata. To enter into a dialogue with a psychoanalyst, a biographer must be prepared to cross the boundaries of his professional discipline. In therapeutic psychoanalysis, transference phenomena are facilitated in the analytic process. The past is reexperienced in the present through the analysand’s need to mold his perceptions of the analyst into preexisting schemata.
