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This volume contains some of the best thinking of a self-selected group of people who, in the 1930s, opted out of the cumbersome explorations of orthodox ego-psychology in favor of a not-so-narrowly defined study of the dynamics of human relationships. Of the seven actual pioneers, the majority were women. They studied and cared about patients in a practical, down-to-earth way at a time when clinical psychiatry dealt mostly with classification rather than with helping people to learn about themselves. They taught patients to live their lives to the fullest extent possible, with the equipment they were born with. It is well to remember also that the institution builders, except for Harry Stack Sullivan who had his own special role, were all women: Frieda Fromm-Reichmann at Chestnut Lodge, Karen Horney at her Institute, Janet Rioch and Clara Thompson at the White Institute. Many of this particular subset of psychoanalysts treated the people classical analysts declared untreatable.
We must recall also that this pioneering work was done without the benefit of health insurance. Seriously troubled people worked and scraped up enough money to pay for their treatment and were proud of it. They were charged according to their ability to pay, which meant that most analysts worked long hours for a modest living. Here I have no wish to make it sound as if those were the good old days, or the bad old days. They were times of great enthusiasm and of crushing disappointments. There were still no effective psychotropic medications available, but the Kraepelinian nihilism and indifference to the individual that had ruled psychiatry in the first quarter of this century had been gradually eroding as a number of distinct streams of clinical studies of individual differences in outcome appeared in the literature. Bleuler perhaps best represented the emerging understanding in in-patient psychiatry; Freud and Jung spelled out the ways in which a therapist's understanding of an individual p