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Early In The Interview with Irwin Hirsch, Benjamin Wolstein considers the possibility that his analyst, Clara Thompson, acted as a conduit to her analyst, Sandor Ferenczi. Wolstein muses that his conceptualization of the psychoanalytic situation as “experiential field” was an inheritance of Ferenczi's “dialogue of the unconscious” and technique of mutual analysis via Thompson's concept of “direct psychoanalytic experience.”
Whatever the truth of Wolstein's musing in this regard, the vital dialogue between him and Hirsch that ensues affords the reader a remarkable window into the history and evolution of psychoanalytic praxis. Wolstein's career covers nearly a half-century of roiling change within a discipline that itself has only recently celebrated its first centennial.
Throughout the entire period of his work, Wolstein has been a radical and controversial originator of the very changes that today command center stage in the psychoanalytic debate. While Wolstein's fundamental tenet regarding the nature of the clinical enterprise may be a commonplace, if still controversial principle today—the analyst's use of his own experiences as the central phenomena in informing his interaction with his patient—Wolstein proposed it in the 1950s. Clearly, both as psychoanalytic thinker and clinician, Wolstein was way ahead of his time.
Wolstein, however, did not simply wait for the times to catch up with him. His ideas regarding the nature of the analyst's participation continue to be unique and radical, even in today's more receptive analytic atmosphere. Hence, this issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis has gathered a number of eminent analysts from different schools to respond to his ideas. Their commentaries attest to the vitality of Wolstein's thinking in the contemporary psychoanalytic world, as well as to the controversy his ideas continue to inspire.