Editors' Introduction

This issue is the second in our series on the technical topic of “Trouble in the Transference.” In it we focus on one of the more complex challenges in this area, the Perverse Transference. As most broadly understood, a perverse transference is one in which the patient endeavors to avoid analysis of a perverse aspect of his psychology (be it actual perversion, character perversion, perverse modes of dealing with reality, and so forth) by inducing the analyst to collude in its indirect reenactment in the transference. The perverse transference can be discussed from many points of view, but we will leave it to our authors to contribute their own viewpoints.

We have other goals for this issue. These may already have been perceived by followers of Marshall McLuhan's principle: the medium is the message. For we have culled our papers on the perverse transference from among those presented at a rather unusual symposium which took place on December 13, 1992, in New York City, entitled “Contemporary Controversies in Psychoanalytic Technique.” This symposium was held under the auspices of the International Psychoanalytic Association in honor of R. Horacio Etchegoyen, President-Elect, with Arlene Kramer Richards, Ed.D., as moderator. What was unusual about the symposium was that it featured together on the same platform for the first time representatives from all of the Psychoanalytic Institutes of New York City currently recognized by the International Psychoanalytic Association under the new structure, which allows for direct membership in the International. Representatives spoke from the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (Columbia), The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, the New York Freudian Society, the Psychoanalytic Association of New York, and the New York Psychoanalytic Society.1