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To have touched greatness through the written word is an opportunity. To have met it personally is a gift. To have had both, more one could not ask. The life history of such a dynamic event began twenty-three years ago. I first met Dr. Goldstein at the Montefiore Hospital where I was the resident in neurology. My personal level of maturity was adequate to a dim awareness that “communion is the basis of all communication.”1 I vaguely sensed I was in the presence of a presence. Many years of participating in that form of “communication that makes psychotherapy possible”2 were necessary before I could be more open to the depth of meaning of such experiencing.3
It was to take more years of being with Goldstein's living creativity, which has evolved through many phases, before its influences began to manifest itself. A succession of papers bears testament to my indebtedness. Where their content is seemingly remote from his areas of interest, their development reflects my continuing response to the spirit and nature of his method. It helped to guide my self-investigations, my work with patients, and the development of my ideas. This is Goldstein's description of it: “In practice, we usually proceed in such a way that, from the facts gained by analysis, we sketch a picture of the whole organism, which in turn instigates further questions and investigations, so long as we encounter discrepancies between this picture and factual experience. Upon the basis of new inquiries, the picture of the whole is again modified and the process of discovering new discrepancies and new enquiries follows, and so on. By such an empirical procedure, in a dialectic manner, a progressively more adequate knowledge of the nature of the organism is acquired, and an increasingly correct evaluation of the observed facts, as to whether they are essential to the organism, is obtained.4 The material is essentially supposed to demonstrate over and over again that method as well as theory must originate f