Introduction to the Special Issue on Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and Feminism

This Issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis is dedicated to the memory of Ruth Moulton (1915-1999), who was so many things to the William Alanson White Institute. As Marylou Lionells tells us in the brief biographical essay that opens this collection of papers, Moulton was a loved and admired analyst, an inspiring supervisor and teacher, a dedicated administrator. Stanley Coen adds to this portrait in the course of telling us how Moulton, Alberta Szalita, and others, by participating in both the William Alanson White Institute and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, contributed to an “easy overlap” between these two institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s and to an enduring mutual respect.

From the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s, when she was already well into middle age, Moulton published her ideas, quite often in this journal. What better way, then, to memorialize her in our pages than to examine the very topic she most often explored in those papers: the relationship of interpersonal psychoanalysis and feminism?

This issue of the journal is intended to be both a history of these issues and an update of them. Where have we been? Where are we now? Sue Shapiro contributes a long-needed, incisive, and fascinating history of the topic. Jane Flax evaluates in contemporary terms the work of Moulton, Clara Thompson, and Karen Horney, the people who, more than any others, formulated the beginnings of the relationship of interpersonal psychoanalysis and feminism. Edgar Levenson contributes some thoughts regarding Thompson, Moulton, and the evolution of interpersonal psychoanalysis. Michelle Price Miletic offers a review of Karen Horney's work on the psychology of women. It is high time for interpersonal psychoanalysts and those most deeply influenced by Horney, two groups that have so much in common, to maintain a more continuous conversation