On the Dawn of Experience: The Past Recaptured

In the past decade, Joseph Lichtenberg has done more than anyone else in the psychoanalytic community to keep open lines of communication among the increasingly isolated segments of our discipline. This ecumenical activity has taken him from a respected role as a psychoanalytic scholar and teacher into ever more influential positions as the organizer of panels and symposia, the editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and a series of topical books, and now the author of an ambitious monograph of Psychoanalysis and Infant Research. There could be no more fitting way to acknowledge Lichtenberg's invaluable services to psychoanalysis than to devote an issue of the journal he has guided with such distinction since its inception to his most ambitious effort in the service of science. For, despite its relative brevity, Lichtenberg's book is an essential building block if we are to achieve a new consensus within psychoanalysis to succeed the centrifugal tendencies of the last generation.

The threatened fragmentation of our field into hositle factions heatedly defending ideological partis pris has always been a byproduct of the fact that the psychoanalytic method yields relatively scant evidence about personality development in the preverbal period of life. Consequently, every clinical theory, starting with