The Legacy of Enrico Jones

In this first research section of 2005 we celebrate the stunning accomplishments and legacy of the late Enrico Jones, a major researcher in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, especially in the area of psychoanalytic process, and a friend and colleague to countless students, researchers, and practitioners in those fields. Enrico's contributions were characterized by two features that he kept always in balance: his grasp of the depth and complexity of psychoanalytic ideas and therapeutic processes and a steadfast commitment to using appropriate empirical approaches to deepen their investigation. These concerns consistently informed his work and led to the many articles cited by J. Stuart Ablon in a paper coauthored with Jones, the target paper of this section. To complete the picture, four additional references (Jones 1995, 1997; Jones, Cumming, and Pulos 1993; Jones, and Price 1998) relevant to Jones's study of psychoanalytic processes are listed at the end of this introduction.

Our format for this section, the target paper by Ablon and Jones discussed at length by Peter Fonagy and Sidney Blatt, creates an especially felicitous “hall” in which to display key aspects and implications of Jones's thinking. Readers can “listen in” as two knowledgeable and seasoned psychoanalytic researchers engage the ideas offered by Ablon and Jones and can immerse themselves further as Ablon returns to the stage to reply to the appreciative, astute challenges raised by the discussants.

One of Enrico Jones's gifts to our field was to bring heightened awareness of the great relevance of an observational and data-analytic technique, the Q-sort, to psychoanalytic research. The Q-sort is an instrument used in virtually all of his clinical research. The approach appears yet again in Geoff Goodman's paper, the second contribution in this section. Despite Jones's influence, and recent Q-sort diagnosis applications by Drew Westen and colleagues (Westen and Arkowitz-Westen 1998; ; Shedler 2002), th