Introduction

Six of the papers in this issue were presented at the day long symposium held on March 31, 1984, sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and entitled Separation and Loss: Clinical Issues. The keynote speaker was Dr. Harold Searles, who gave the thirty-second annual Karen Horney lecture.

It seemed serendipitous at first that the 1983 symposium was on attachment, with John Bowlby the Horney lecturer, and that Dr, Searles chose to speak on separation and loss the following year. The fortuitous choice of subjects should not be very surprising, however, since attachment, separation, and loss are subjects in the forefront of much psychoanalytic thinking. The exploration of these subjects seems to be part of a beginning attempt to integrate so many new findings in the fields of infant, child, and adult development with psychoanalytic theory and practice.

The interplay between constitutional or biological factors, environmental influences during development, and intrapsychic dynamics will no doubt continue to be the subject of much discussion and research and many future symposia. Dr. Horney found the orthodox Freudian theory of stages, fixations, and repetitions too mechanistic and narrowly instinctivistic to be of use as a broad developmental theory. She confined her thinking in this area to tracing pathologic development, finding psychopathology to be more predictably staged and repetitious than self-realization, her term for healthy growth and development.

As other psychoanalytic groups have broadened their outlook, we see a growing interest in the individual as a developing whole coping with the often divisive effects of external forces. That disordered attachments lead to disordered, conflicted selves seems to be evolving into a consensus of opinion in the wider psychoanalytic community. Also developing is the appreciation that our conflicted inner selves or identities go on to form disordered, conflicted attachments with others, with ensuing v