You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Robert S. Wallerstein—universally known as Bob—has been given a handsome and well-deserved tribute in this book, as well as in the celebratory conference of the Collaborative Analytic Multi-site Project (or CAMP) of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2001, at which most of the papers collected here were presented. Unlike many a Festschrift, this one has enough solid substance to commend it to the attention of a wide readership.
Before the meaty chapters that summarize the present status of research on both the outcome and the process of psychoanalytic therapy, there is a group of short tributes, often telling how the author came to know and work with Bob. I have been invited to include a personal narrative of that kind, so I will imitate the structure of the book by reminiscing about my contacts with him before addressing the more substantive part of the book.
I had preceded Bob at Topeka by a few years, long enough to be trained in diagnostic testing by David Rapaport and then to be drawn into the research project he and Karl Menninger had begun, seeking to learn how to do a better job of selecting young doctors for psychiatric training. Soon I was joined by Lester Luborsky, and later a few other collaborators for shorter times. With Rapaport's encouragement, we launched into a reorganization of the Selection Project, as it was known. After three years of preparing a research design, with a specified set of aspects of personality and ability that were to be appraised by means of interviewing and testing tools we chose or devised, we were ready to try out our newly honed instruments on an incoming class of applicants for residency (Holt and Luborsky 1958). Among them was a young doctor—Bob Wallerstein—with a rather impressive resumé, an engaging mixture of youthfulness