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IN 1954 A CLUSTER OF PAPERS APPEARED in this journal attempting to define the essence of psychoanalysis. The thrust of those contributions was to delineate psychoanalysis from its more diffuse derivative, dynamic psychotherapy, which was then burgeoning in the United States. The historical background for this strong emergent interest stemmed from the inroads made by psychoanalysis in permeating American psychiatry at that time. One result of that success was a need to establish the borders of the more circumscribed discipline to prevent its being engulfed and rendered invisible by the larger, more eclectic science.
It is fitting that this subject, so central to our scientific and therapeutic method, serve as a background for the coming exchange occasioned by the first scientific Congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association to be held on the American shore. Recent decades have seen a steady and increasing exchange of views between American1 psychoanalysts and the rest of the psychoanalytic world. Our views of psychoanalysis as a process and treatment in 1979 as compared with those of 1954 will be set forth against a background of changing historical times.
The ground behind the figure today, in contrast to the picture a quarter of a century ago, is not one of expansion and engulfment but of shrinkage and separation. The psychiatric and general intellectual surround today is more questioning than embracing, and presents what Anna Freud