Voices that Changed Psychoanalysis in Unpredictable Ways

The two papers we are republishing in this issue as part of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly's 75^th anniversary year celebration were written by analysts who changed the course of psychoanalytic history, but the nature and direction of their influences could not have been more different, or less predictable at the time.

Hans Loewald, whose elegant and far-ranging theoretical writing is represented here by “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” (1962), has been claimed as an ancestor by almost every psychoanalytic movement that followed him. Because of his integrative point of view with its overlapping intrapsychic and intersubjective perspectives, he is featured as the progenitor of American relational psychoanalysis,1 but no less is his influence felt in self psychology, in contemporary attachment theory, in the changing views of early infantile-maternal interaction and its incorporation into psychoanalytic listening, and in the “softening” of American ego psychology.

The establishment of Loewald's iconic status by nascent, competing schools would have surprised him. Unable to predict the splintering of American psychoanalysis and the emergence of variety from what was once a more integrated whole, Loewald never directly promoted such splintering, and always considered himself