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Psychoanalytic inquiry is celebrating the successful completion of its first decade as a vital forum of unfettered discourse; at the same time, we are on the threshold of being able to commemorate the centenary of our origins as a discipline, Sigmund Freud's initial psychotherapeutic efforts as a private practitioner. Personally, I have been deeply immersed in psychoanalysis, as a student and as a practitioner, for some 40 years, and was primed to enter the profession (in part through family connections in Budapest and Prague) well before starting medical school. I begin on this personal note in order to clarify the subjective bias that colors my view of the last ten years of psychoanalytic history: I have lived within psychoanalysis longer than I have dwelt in America—I might even claim that it is the only community in which I do not feel an exile. Family myth has it that in old age my paternal grandfather overcame his bronchial asthma through reading Freud—when? about seven decades ago.… In expansive moods, I have been heard to say, “La psychanalyse, c'est moi!”—when I am seized with bitterness about the politics of our undisciplined discipline, I curse it as a cosa nostra.
The person who had the greatest impact on me as a teacher was my compatriot, Therese Benedek, whose brief analysis with Ferenczi took place before 1920. When she was close to 80, I had