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This collection of papers on the interpersonal perspective in psychoanalysis, published between 1960 and 1990, requires considerable historical
context if their importance and the editors' purpose in reprinting them are to be understood. By the middle of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis in the United States had achieved a dominant position regarding both the diagnosis and the treatment of mental disorders. Whether it was called classical, traditional, or orthodox, a Freudian version of what constituted “true psychoanalysis” held sway in the medically dominated institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA). To question, no less challenge, the basic assumptions of the Freudian elevation of the infantile unconscious was to risk being told that what you were doing wasn't psychoanalysis. Further, your divergence from the reigning orthodoxy meant you were likely to be told that you weren't a psychoanalyst at all. It is in this context that a number of individuals in Washington, D.C., and New York dissented from the dominant psychoanalytic culture, ultimately developing a series of ideas about theory and technique that in the aggregate came to be known as interpersonal psychoanalysis. These analysts either resigned from APsaA or were forced out, and eventually coalesced around the William Alanson White Institute in New York. They were neither the first dissidents nor the most threatening to American ego psychology at that time; that honor belonged to Melanie Klein and her many followers in England and South America. However, because they were relegated to a separate intellectual sphere, their contributions developed in a separate universe; their papers went unread by traditional psychoanalysts. Interpersonal psychoanalysts might have been well known in their own segregated world, but they too went unrecognized by classical analysts. This separation was fueled on the one hand by the passionate rejection of interpersonal perspectives by traditionalalis