Introduction

Martin Stein has been described as the “analyst's analyst.” Much sought after as a supervisor, he has been called a “revered clinician,” a “superb teacher,” and the “guardian of psychoanalytic educational standards.” Perhaps more important, he has been a major contributor to the growth of psychoanalytic thought. Colored by his wide cultural knowledge, his skill with language, and his deeply humanistic vision, his papers range across the entire analytic spectrum. Technique, language, character, transference, the dream, consciousness, object ties, talent, and the concept of mental health have all received his penetrating attention, as he has worked to broaden our perspective from the narrower scope of psychopathology to a more comprehensive understanding of normality. The New York Psychoanalytic Society is pleased to honor Dr. Stein with a symposium touching on many of these wide-ranging interests.

Though it is hardly possible to do justice to the scope of Martin Stein's prolific contributions to psychoanalysis and its literature in the space allotted, I am going to attempt a sketch of these accomplishments. In an early paper, “Premonition as Defense” (1953), Dr. Stein