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In November 1979, the Hampstead Clinic held its first international scientific forum which was attended by some 70 invited psychoanalysts from all over the world. The meeting was held in memory of Willie Hoffer, making use of funds provided by an anonymous donor who wanted them to be devoted to something which Willie Hoffer would have liked. The topic for this first forum (which we hope will become an annual event) was the significance of insight in psychoanalytic theory and practice.
The present issue is devoted in its entirety to an edited version of the discussions during the plenary sessions of this three-day event. To help the reader in following the somewhat complex structure of this forum, editorial comments (in italics) will be inserted where appropriate.
With the exception of the first three papers (by Miss Anna Freud, Dr S. Guttman and Dr A. Valenstein) which were presented at the beginning of the first plenary session and which will be summarized since the full text of at least two of them will appear in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, all the contributions to the plenary sessions have received the minimum of editorial changes and deletions. In this way we hope to have been able to retain much of the liveliness of the contributions and exchanges.
The Editorial Cammittee would like to express its warmest thanks to Gina Bon for the Herculean task of transcribing the tapes on which the proceedings were recorded, and to Carla Elliott for her summaries and her help in editing the transcripts for publication.