Dedication

At the suggestion of the Issue Editors and with the enthusiastic agreement of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry editorial board, this issue is dedicated to Nathaniel London, M.D., 1927-1989.

Nat London and I grew up a few blocks apart in a neighborhood of reasonably affluent second- or third-generation Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe. In that setting intense discussions of capitalism, socialism, and communism, of the New Deal, the depression, and the threat of fascism, of orthodoxy and reformed Judiasm and atheism were commonplace. In other words, we grew up in a world of lively dialectic, to put a toney reference to it or Talmudic quibbling once removed, to give it its origin.

It was no surprise, then, that Nat the doctor, the analyst, and the institute director became a major challenger of stated doctrines. Nor were we surprised to hear him ask questions like, Is any prevailing view of schizophrenia acceptable in itself? Is the concept of the transference neurosis evolving or obsolete? Nor to hear him answering—against a prevailing trend—It is evolving. Nor to find him becoming interested in self psychology but soon asking, If empathy predominates, then where is the place for the worthy adversary?—and then telling a tale of the therapeutic effect on the transference of an episode of arm wrestling. Nor his challenging admonition that self in self psychology is as apt to become anthropomorphic as was ego in ego psychology.

Finally, I recall the heated phone calls we had about his insistence on using the word ludic in the title of his wonderful paper, “On Play Elements in Regression,” which began the first issue of Psychoanalytic Inquirty. Ludic, he said, emphasized a special, nonserious quality of the interactional context of a transference neurosis. Play, I said, played better to the readers we hoped to appeal to. And so it went, the nonserious joy of dialectic about the serious issues of our day in psychoanalysis: What are the play/ludic aspects of the transf