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In the mid-1950's when I was beginning my years as a candidate and, at the same time, beginning to summer in the Berkshires, I began to hear reports of an important but unpublished paper by David Rapaport, then the Director of Research at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was said that, although full of provocative ideas, the paper was not in a state in which Rapaport, with his exigent standards, was willing to expose it to the critical scrutiny of his colleagues. Indeed it was not until the posthumous publication of Rapaport's collected papers (Gill, 1967) that "Some Metapsychological Considerations Concerning Activity and Passivity" became generally accessible, although mimeographed copies had for some time been available to those of us with connections at Riggs.
Rapaport's essay struck me with great immediate force, since it resonated with some of my own inchoate ideas. Out of my experiences in clinical psychiatry and the beginnings of my work in psychoanalysis I had begun to develop the view that the activity-passivity dimension was a critical one for the understanding of psychopathology and for its remediation. I had been impressed by the frequency of feelings of helplessness, inertia, and lack of resource in the patients I had seen, and, alternatively, the importance of mastery and the active pursuit