You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The eighteen essays in this volume, written between 1938 and 1964—the period of the coming of age of American psychoanalysis—, cover a wide range of issues and are indicative of the breadth of the author's interests. The fact that several of the articles, in particular On Ego Distortion, The Emotional Position of the Analyst, and On Curative Factors, have become minor classics suggests the depth of his psychoanalytic understanding.
To truly come of age requires that we tolerate disappointment, uncertainty, and ambiguity without disillusionment or disavowal but with renewed inquiry. Gitelson was quite capable of this creative resolution. In his last paper, On the Identity Crisis in American Psychoanalysis, presented to the Plenary Session of the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1964, he argued that the scientific rigor necessary for elaborating the classical model of the psychoanalytic situation is incompatible with the therapeutic flexibility required to practice psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In this article he emphasized Kuhn's concept of a scientific paradigm; that is, a generalization 'sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents' and yet 'sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems