Shelley Orgel, M.D.

Returning to Dr. Stone's classic monograph1 is like revisiting a good old friend. It is wonderful to be stimulated to remember the early days of a special relationship—with the essay itself, and with the man who endows these pages with his particular qualities as a human being. Dr. Stone helped many of us to mature as analysts not least because his own example helped us to mature as human beings. This essay, once considered questionably “liberal” by some, even tainted by psychotherapeutic dilutions, is now clearly identified as being in the psychoanalytic mainstream, and is, if anything, a powerful conservative voice regarding the basic clinical necessities. In his monograph, what emerges is the self-portrait of an ideal analyst—modest, reasonable, decent, polite, even courtly, compassionate, meticulous in his language. He has a physician's commitment to the therapeutic task which calls him to preserve the psychoanalytic situation until the work of analysis is done as well and completely as two people decide it can be, given the fundamental persistence of the “eternal flame” of transference.

This goal and this definition of the analyst's professional identity led him to write that, “The psychoanalytic attitude (indeed, this is true of the whole situational structure) is best understood by both parties as a technical instrumentality with which an interested physician can best help his patient” (p. 33). We note that the “frank and evident therapeutic (i.e. physicianly) commitment” is in the forefront, a therapeutic aim by no means merely incidental to a primary goal of investigation or exploration. Furthermore, one aspect of this emphasis includes the patient's gradual understanding of why the analyst works as he or she does. Such desirable enlightenment gives glimpses into the analyst's mind, making certain inferences about the analyst as a person inevitable, but need not violate the analyst's essential privacy. And, of course, Dr. Stone realizes fully that the analys