Introduction

The Past that Breaks Out in Our Hearts

All human beings, children and adults, seek to know themselves as worthwhile and to feel that they are in charge of themselves. A crucial aspect of this sense of free will is to know one's history and not feel dominated or destroyed by it. As the only creatures capable of knowing their past, the story of their lives, human beings use constructions and reconstructions of the past to cope with their present and to anticipate and influence their future. Each person yearns for a coherent narrative, “a longitudinal study” of his or her unique life story (Solnit, 1983).

This paper is inspired by and reflective of the contributions of Ernst and Marianne Kris who were teachers, supervisors, colleagues, and friends as they introduced me and others to the Longitudinal Study at the Yale Child Study Center that they organized in the late 1940s with Milton J. E. Senn and to which they gave brilliant scientific and clinical leadership (Kris, 1947, 1953; Senn, 1968; ; Ritvo, McCollum, Omwake, Provence, and Solnit, 1970). Ernst and Marianne would have been playful and responsive in a relevant manner to the challenge of this panel, as formulated by Frank Baudry and Wendy Olesker, to have ten minutes “to present a core idea on the general topic” of the “Relevance of Longitudinal Studies for Clinical Psychoanalysis.”

In Ernst Kris and Milton J. E. Senn organized the Longitudinal Study at the Child Study Center of Yale University in which psychoanalytic hypotheses and methods were combined with pediatric