Editorial Comment

Conforming to our policy of focusing from time to time on clinical material derived from an actual analytic relationship, we are pleased to devote this issue of the Journal to the report of a case that figured in the early history of modern psychoanalysis. This report is a session-by-session, annotated record of the treatment, during the 1950s, of a severely disturbed adolescent in a casework setting. The treatment was conducted under a research project directed by Hyman Spotnitz at a district office of the Jewish Board of Guardians, a New York City child guidance agency.

The treatment was conducted by the late Leo Nagelberg, a staff psychologist of the agency, under the supervision of Hyman Spotnitz. As supervisor of the JBG office where the boy met with Nagelberg over a period of four years, the late Yonata Feldman also functioned in a supervisory capacity. During her distinguished career in the training of social workers, Feldman remained active until shortly before her death in 1981. She conducted courses at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, helped to formulate its policies on supervision and training, and contributed articles to this Journal. One of her articles, “The Early History of Modern Psychoanalysis,” published in 1978, provides a fitting introduction to the case presentation that follows.

The introduction to the first comprehensive case presentation published in 1980 in  Mod. Psychoanal.  5:  3-4↗ states:

The appearence of such case presentations in the Journal is prompted primarily by the belief that they provide intellectual

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stimulation to our readers. To students, in particular, we wish to point out that they are not published to illustrate how patients should be treated or to sanction one or another mode of intervention employed by the writer. In other words, these clinical reports are not presented to guide the student-reader on how to intervene with his/her own patients. Each report simply constitutes an historical record of what happened bet