Morton Shane, M.D

I read The Psychoanalytic Situation in 1961, the year it was issued. I also underlined passages and made comments to myself in the margins. I was so strongly persuaded then by what I read that I determined to make this author's vision of analysis my own, with reservations, of course. Some of my original reservations remain with me today; for example, the view of language as intimately involved with separation from the primal mother, a shorthand which seemed to ignore the wealth of studies available even at that time concerning the development of symbolic, semiotic processes of cognition. But my original positive responses to the book have also remained intact, and my affection and respect for the author, whom I had not met until just a few years ago, has endured. In fact, even today I cannot imagine the term psychoanalytic situation without seeing “Stone (1961)” appended to it.

At the time that I purchased and first read this book, I was being supervised by Ralph Greenson, two years into my first analytic case. Dr. Greenson had been the first person in the field who had made it clear to me that I could, and should, draw upon my own human responses without fear of sacrificing my interpretive stance. “When in doubt,” he once told me, “be human!” Anyway, I reported to Dr. Greenson with enthusiasm that I was reading a new book by Leo Stone, and that Stone agreed with him about so many things. Greenson replied with equal enthusiasm that indeed he did, that he and Stone saw many things in common, different from some other New York analysts, with whom he was fond of contrasting himself. Greenson had not as yet developed his “working alliance” concept, but it is apparent that he might well have derived not only confirmation, but perhaps inspiration, from Stone's own evocative “physicianly attitude.” With this book, Stone had raised the baseline level of responsivity inherent in the analytic stance, which, to my mind, is what makes Stone's book remain as a singularly signific