Editors' Introduction

In this issue we present the second of a two-part series on the controversies generated by the effort to integrate preverbal and extra-analytic factors into the psychoanalytic situation. Dr. Leo Stone, whom we honor by this issue, has been a pivotal factor in this long-standing debate. Dr. Stone emphasized the importance of the earliest mother-child relationship for successful psychoanalysis. This early relationship, according to Dr. Stone, resurfaced in “the primordial transference” and was an indispensible building block of the therapeutic alliance, a feature of adult analysis whose existence and importance he also emphasized. The straightforward human responses of the analyst in the analytic situation, according to Dr. Stone, are helpful in enabling the primordial transference and fostering the therapeutic alliance.

Our first group of papers is drawn from a symposium held by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in honor of Dr. Stone on December 5, 1992. The papers have been updated and expanded where noted. Dr. Milton Horowitz discusses those aspects of the primordial transference concept which have been most meaningful to him. Dr. Sander Abend presents a critique of the therapeutic alliance concept which generates a lively discussion. Dr. Dorothy Holmes presents clinical material illustrative of the influence of childhood sexual abuse on the analytic transference and the therapeutic alliance.

Dr. Stone's concepts have been most beautifully expressed in his classic book The Psychoanalytic Situation. We have endeavored to illustrate the impact of Dr. Stone's thinking on the broad field of psychoanalysis by gathering together and publishing in full the reviews by four distinguished analysts of The Psychoanalytic Situation presented to the American Psychoanalytic Association's “Classics Revisited” panel of May, 1994. These reviews have been revised and expanded by the authors for this purpose.

We have no doubt that the various controversies surrounding the use of “pre