Editors' Introduction

When, in 1992, we introduced Volume 1, Number 1, of our new publication to the psychoanalytic community, we pledged that “The Journal will undertake to meet a universally felt need for greater access to clinical data. It will do so by providing the reader with case studies in a breadth and depth hitherto unavailable.”

It is especially gratifying to us, therefore, to present in this issue a fine case history by Patrick Mahony, Ph.D., which directly fulfills this pledge. We are certain that our readers, as did we, will enjoy and learn much from Dr. Mahony's candid, sensitive, and scholarly depiction of a psychoanalytic process which he conducted with consummate technical skill. We venture to predict that this case, for reasons which will become clear to the readers, will one day take its place among the classics as “The Bear Man.” Dr. Mahony adds a postscript in which he discusses aspects of the analytic case history, and provides an interesting perspective on psychoanalysis as “the seeing cure.”

It is our custom, in these introductory pages, from time to time to take note of a phenomenon well known to our readers: how very difficult it is to write a long and detailed description of a psychoanalytic process; that is why there are so few in the literature. Dr. Mahony, and our other contributors, are greatly to be commended for taking up this challenge. However, we should note that the study of such cases places special demands also upon the reader. It is not easy to plunge directly into primary process sequences as they appear on the printed page. One has to immerse oneself simultaneously in the minds of both patient and analyst, if the case has been well presented. It takes time and perhaps several readings before this is comfortably accomplished. We guarantee that our readers who take up this challenge will be amply rewarded.

We are fortunate to be able to include in this same issue an excellent case study by Jules M. Weiss, M.D., in which he describes his