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This book is a celebration of Robert Wallerstein's fundamental role in the development and promotion of psychoanalytic research and its integration into the mainstream of psychoanalysis. As Peter Fonagy notes in
this volume of tribute, “more than any other psychoanalyst in the world, Robert Wallerstein has legitimized research in the eyes of the average clinician” (p. 18).
From Impression to Inquiry is the outgrowth of a day-long Festschrift symposium held in 2001 by the Collaborative Analytic Multisite Project (CAMP)—a group of psychoanalytic therapy researchers under the auspices of the American Psychoanalytic Association—to honor Wallerstein on the occasion of his stepping down from his role as its founding director. Wallerstein first convened the group in 1989, with the goal of bringing together all the major psychoanalytic therapy research groups in the country, so that they might enrich each other with their different perspectives and methodological approaches while also seeking common ground. The group subsequently grew to include European research teams as well.
As noted in the introduction by the book's editors, Wilma Bucci and Norbert Freedman, the embrace of diverse perspectives—along with the simultaneous search for more unitary truths about psychoanalysis—runs as a leitmotif throughout Wallerstein's work. This theme was voiced in his historic address, “One Psychoanalysis or Many?”,1 presented at the International Psychoanalytical Association's 1987 Congress in Montreal, and it can be seen in his advocacy throughout his career for psychoanalysis to exist not just as a branch of psychiatry within medicine, but as an independent discipline that discourses not only with biological science, but also with academic and clinical psychology, the behavioral and social sciences, philosophy, linguistics, and other areas of human thought.
The book suffers somewhat from its origins as a Festschrift symposium. It is a bit of a hodgepodge, with contributions that are in