ABSTRACT
Fred Plaut gives a personal account of forty years as an analyst in England and in Germany. He observes how economic factors have forced changes in working practices for analysts, and caused conflicts of loyalties for new practitioners. A comparison is made between the quarrels of analytical ‘families’ in the past (which led to splits within and between training institutes) and current professional differ ences and anxieties about economic and political survival which need to be met by unity rather than further fragmentation. For Plaut, identification rather then ‘iden tity’ is seen as a useful container of these conflicts. However, there is a danger it may also destroy the development of individual originality as well as the organic growth of analytic institutions.
