Introduction

The essays in this section were originally gathered by Fred M. Levin and Arnold Wilson in honor of the seventieth birthday of John E. Gedo. Several were presented at a symposium sponsored by the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis on October 18, 1997, celebrating the intellectual legacy of John Gedo. The conference was titled “The Fusion of Science, Art, and Humanism.”

Other essays published in this section were invited or came about de novo as a result of a groundswell of interest from friends and colleagues. Each author has in one way or another—personally and professionally—been profoundly influenced by John Gedo, and each author took this opportunity to express appreciation for him and his work through the medium he most passionately respects—lucid scholarship about matters psychoanalytic, in all its diverse permutations.

All went through peer review by The Annual's Editorial Committee. Some of the essays are primarily concerned with psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and they will appear in Volume 28 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, together with other essays dealing with similar matters.

Traditional disciplinary boundaries seem to disappear in Gedo's oeuvre. If there is any single theme, it is Gedo's clarion call for a hierarchical model for psychoanalysis, one that promotes a healthy and necessary ecumenism, thereby limiting the shortcomings of any single preexisting school of thought. John Gedo remains a man with a great and abiding scholarly passion for his cherished field. He has no more fervent wish than for psychoanalysis to emerge in the next millennium as a formidable intellectual, social, and cultural magnet. He knows that psychoanalysis can only flourish and live on by dint of the strength, vigor, and flexibility of its ideas, not merely as a consequence of the number of patients