Editors' Introduction

How are we to connect data derived from the talking cure with observations from the earliest preverbal periods of life?

Intuitively we may all be certain that human development is a continuous process from birth onward; and that the infant begets the child begets the adolescent begets the adult. Yet how can we substantiate these intuitions in a scientific manner without succumbing to adultomorphic fantasies? Or is this task impossible?

In fact, this is the oldest running unresolved controversy in clinical psychoanalysis. It was already implicit in the earliest Klein-A. Freud conflicts. By the 1940s and 1950s lines of conflict around this controversy had formed anew amid the mainstream Freudians or ego psychologists. On the one side were eminent and respected analysts who had no difficulty discerning and integrating into their adult psychoanalyses the most archaic preverbal phenomena (Stone, 1961; Greenacre, 1981). On the other side were equally respected and eminent analysts who doubted that the preverbal-verbal gap was ever bridgeable in adult analyses and who cautioned strongly against a particular adultomorphic distortion, “the genetic fallacy” (Hartmann, 1955). These positions have remained relatively fixed over the years: There are few converts either way.

In recent decades the controversy has sharpened and intensified because of two concurrent trends: The observational and longitudinal studies of infants and children have increased in numbers and sophistication around the world; and there has proliferated a number of alternative analytic approaches (or “schools”) which tend to rely more heavily on the data and concepts pertaining to earliest infancy (neo-Kleinians, object-relationists, self psychologists, intersubjectivists). In contrast still stand the “mainstream” or “conflict and compromise-formation” analysts who continue to caution lest the primary data of the analytic situation be skewed by wishful adultomorphic fantasy, i.e., by “genetic fallacy.”