I am grateful to the editors for having asked me to comment on this panel and I am delighted to offer my thoughts since this is a subject that has intrigued me for almost four decades.

It is forty years since the first of the modern drugs was introduced into psychiatric practice and thirty-five years since I wrote my first paper advocating the combination of medication with psychoanalysis (Ostow and Kline, 1956).1 Fairly early, a number of the

distinguished analysts of the last generation were willing to have medication prescribed for analytic patients, including Anna Freud, Edith Jacobson, Annie Reich, Kurt Eissler, and Herman Nunberg. In 1957, Dr. Gerald J. Sarwer-Foner organized a three-day conference on the physiologic and psyc