Editors Introduction

With this issue, Modern Psychoanalysis enters its second decade. The editors are prompted to reflection. It may be time to consider what we've been about, now that a body of evidence has accumulated in the form of eighteen issues totalling some 2600 pages. We began with some aims in mind, and we've kept them in mind—so some retrospection may not be idle—there may be some value in reexamining our purposes, possibly to renew our commitment to them. And then, psychoanalysts never disdain history.

Modern Psychoanalysis, the journal of the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, first appeared in the Spring of 1976, giving as its purposes: To document the movement, then already 20 years in process, to expand the application of psychoanalytic practice beyond the original limits set by Freud; to encourage the publication of papers reporting the development of theory and technique that would finally apply psychoanalytic method to treating the full spectrum of human emotional disorders.

Documenting the ongoing development of modern psychoanalysis has taken many forms, including reports of work in progress in our departments of Research and Experimentation in Psychoanalysis and Applied Psychoanalysis, as well as such finished clinical work as the landmark case report by Evelyn J. Liegner that constituted the whole content of Volume Five, Number One, in 1980. Modern Psychoanalysis has also been pleased to publish from time to time the annual scientific conferencs of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis—the papers presented and the discussions they engender—a source both of advance and of broadening the application of analytic methodologies.