Leo Stone (1903-1997)

Dr Leo Stone, who died this past summer at the age of 94, occupied a special place in the American psychoanalytic movement. The affection and respect he was accorded bordered on reverence. He served as president both of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute, was a recipient of the Sigourney Award, and delivered both the Brill and Freud Lectures, in addition to many other tokens of distinction. His contributions to the literature of psychoanalysis, small in number as they may have been, were most influential. His ideas, in fact, may be considered as a point of departure for many of the current technical innovations in psychoanalytic treatment, those that emphasise the contribution of the analyst's personality in the treatment process. Central to his approach to technique was the idea of the analyst as a healer.

Starting with his paper on ‘The widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis’ (1954b) and ‘The psychoanalytic situation and transference’ (1967), a paper which he designated ‘Postscript to an earlier communication’, and in practically all of his subsequent contributions, Stone emphasised the role of the analyst as a benign, nurturing, helpful force. Fundamental to Stone's view of the therapeutic relationship was the idea that it had its roots in the very early, protective, nurturing, sustaining dependency on the mother or other caretakers. This was the baseline, according to Stone, from which all other considerations of technique derived.

In an earlier contribution, both witty and scholarly, ‘On the principal obscene word of the English language (an inquiry with hypothesis regarding its origin and persistence)’ (1954a), Stone traced the origin and the persistence of the word ‘fuck’ to its source in the word ‘suck’. The same line of approach may be found in one of his later papers (Stone, 1986), on the origin of depressive illness. There he states the view that the commonly emphasised elements entering into the formation of depressive