Introduction

The papers on Intimacy and Communication which appear in this issue were delivered at the 1980 conference of the National Accreditation Association for Psychoanalysis. They reflect an exchange of ideas between various schools representative of psychoanalytic thought in America today: Adlerian, Drive Theory, Ego, Freudian, Jungian, Modern Psychoanalytic, Object Relations, and Paradigmatic. The conference itself thus dealt, both in process and form, with intimacy and communication.

Because we are interested in the interaction between the participants, we include the dialogues and discussions that took place together with the prepared addresses. Hence the format of this issue alternates formal presentation of papers with informal dialogue. We hope that this approach will convey to our readers the emotional immediacy that was a significant attribute of the conference, an immediacy that is lost when such dialogues are merely summarized in published reports of proceedings. The significance of the events reported here may be better appreciated in the light of the history of psychoanalysis.

Early in its history, the psychoanalytic community responded to differences by fragmenting itself into relatively isolated components, a response reminiscent of the early history of the individual when splitting is a response to differences the immature psychic apparatus cannot tolerate. The American Psychoanalytic Association compounded