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The two papers we are reprinting in this issue as part of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly's 75th anniversary celebration share something in common besides the fact that each was published in 1942. Both authors write with a narrative style that we have all but lost. It is bold, honest, and personal—even intimate. I will take up the papers individually.
When I was a first-year resident in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in the early 1970s, Helene Deutsch's “Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and Their Relationship to Schizophrenia” was on everyone's reading list. Newly loosed on an inpatient service on which we were to spend the entire year, our fates and our daily lives wedded to those of our patients, we turned to this article as one of several we hoped might rescue us in our work with people we had recently learned to call “borderline.” Some of the others were Hoch and Polatin's on “pseudoneurotic schizophrenia” (1949), Knight's “Borderline States” (1953), T. F. Main's “The Ailment” (1957), Modell's “Primitive Object Relationships and the Predisposition to Schizophrenia” (1963), and Frosch's “The Psychotic Character” (1964). All of these papers had that boldness of descriptive language I mention above—the sense that something on the border between neurosis and psychosis, as we thought, was being newly charted.
But it was Deutsch's descriptions that were most striking and at the same time frightening to us. These were patients—she called them “as-if” patients—who, like clever aliens, appeared in some uncanny way to be normal but were not. As first-year residents, we each feared not only that we might encounter one of them and