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In 1954 the New York psychoanalyst Leo Stone (1904–1997) published an article by the title “The Widening Scope of Indications for Psychoanalysis” in which he wrote:
In no other field, save surgery, to which Freud frequently compared analysis, is the personal equation so important. It is up to us to know our capacities, intellectual and emotional … Again, special predilections, interests, emotional textures may profoundly influence prognosis, and thus – in a tangible way – the indications. I suppose one might generalize crudely to the effect that, apart from skills, a therapist must be able to love a psychotic or a delinquent, and be at least warmly interested in the ‘borderline’ patient (whether or not this feeling is utilized technically), for optimum results. For in a sense, their ‘transferences’ require new objects, the old ones having been destroyed or permanently repudiated, or nearly so … (1954, pp. 592–593)
In the following years Stone developed this innovative and courageous line of thought into the 1961 book The Psychoanalytic Situation: An Examination of its Development and Essential Nature, by which Stone “dropped a ‘bomb’ on the New York Psychoanalytic Society by advocating spontaneity, warmth and humanity” (Altman, 1995, p. 197), as Linda Altman wrote in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 34 years later, reporting on a panel dedicated to this classic of psychoanalysis, held in Philadelphia in 1994. In fact, up to that time, due to the prevalence of the ego-psychological paradigm, “anything than pure interpretation was considered a deviation from correct analytic technique” (p. 197).
In his new book Psychoanalytische Behandlungstechnik, the Munich colleague Wolfgang Mertens (an emeritus professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the Munich Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität), not only places the intersubjective dimension at the center of our clinical work, but also shows the recent evolution of our scientific knowledge about it