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This book contains seventeen of Knight's most significant papers written between 1937 and 1953. Also included are Knight's comments at seventeen clinical conferences held at the Austen Riggs Center between 1947 and 1965. There are, in addition, a complete bibliography of Knight's writings, an introduction by Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a charming and insightful By Way of a Memoir by Erik H. Erikson, and, finally, a very unassuming preface by Stuart C. Miller. The clinical conference discussions, especially, reveal the clarity of Knight's diagnostic acumen and his flexible therapeutic approach, while the formal papers contain his original contributions to the understanding and modified psychoanalytic treatment of chronic alcoholism, the borderline states, and the schizophrenias.
The first and last papers are of enduring historical interest. The former is a delightful account of Knight's visit to Freud in Vienna in 1937; the latter is Knight's address as outgoing President of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1953. This valedictory presentation, The Present Status of Organized Psychoanalysis in the United States, is a condensed but vivid account of the evolution of psychoanalysis in the United States from the time, in 1911, when anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis could join the American Psychoanalytic Association to the emergence of that body after World War II as a complex, centralized organization with numerous functions including the regulation of psychoanalytic training and, in effect, the certification of graduates of its affiliated institutes. Knight was active in the Association's administrative affairs for fifteen years (1938-1953), the years of its most rapid growth and stormy evolution.
It is sometimes difficult to determine the genesis of psychoanalytic ideas. Knight's paper on the analysis of a minister indicates his early awareness of anniversary reactions. It also sets the stage for the dictum that an analyst does not lightly interfere