Introduction

Most of the essays in Section I of this volume were gathered from two important conferences. The 65th Anniversary Symposium of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, March 21–22, 1998, on Psychoanalysis, Neurobiology, and Therapeutic Change, and the Chicago Institute and Analytic Society sponsored Festschrift Symposium for John E. Gedo, October 18, 1997. All the papers in this volume were chosen for the Annual of Psychoanalysis because, in our judgment, they represent cutting-edge contemporary thinking and research that is brought to bear on psychoanalytic theory and technique. The reader will notice that many of the essays make extensive use of the ideas of two seminal thinkers of our times, John Gedo and Gerald Edelman.

In her important paper, Virginia Barry investigates the psychoanalytic theory of internalization. Based partly on some implications and points of convergence with the Neural Darwinism of Edelman, she spans the realms of neuroscience, cognitive science, and developmental psychology as she operationalizes how new learning takes place within clinical psychoanalysis.

The new-look theories provide us with important leverage for investigating how psychoanalysis works. Barbara Fajardo approaches change within analysis from the vantage point of “breaks in consciousness,” emphasizing Edelman's view that mental reorganization and psychological development are distinctly differnt entities. To Fajardo, the key to treatment, however, is overcoming the disavowal that obtains in patients who experience their conflicting mental states serially, rather than simultaneously.

Thirty years ago, Susan Fisher published a remarkable essay on the treatment of an autistic child. In her current essay, she returns to this earlier one, remembering the progress, passion, and the pain of the child's frighteningly vulnerable self in a virtually nonexistent world. This time around, however, she evaluates the experience against the backdrop of theoretical innovation: notably Gedo's