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.
To look back at what Hendrick wrote in the early 1940s is to lift a bell jar on a formative era in American psychoanalytic history, when ego psychology was being established as hegemonic theory. The target paper (“Instinct and the Ego During Infancy,” 1942), with its unusual “addenda” capturing discussions by leading theoreticians on the ideas presented, allows one to enter into a world frozen in time, as if attending a psychoanalytic society meeting of an evening during that period. (These discussions are further described, albeit briefly, in a letter to the editors of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly the following year [Hendrick 1943a].)
Of course, one can never step into the same river twice, and as I now examine Hendrick's period, it is with full awareness of all that has transpired in the intervening sixty-plus years. What I find is someone very much of his time who is writing on the cusp of a new era. It is fascinating to reread Hendrick's article in 2007, not only for its revelations about psychoanalytic thought during this seminal period of our history, but also for its prescience about what (we now know) unfolded in the following decades that has profoundly influenced our field. In this article (and his later one on