Prologue

In This Special Issue, We Feature Papers from a Recently Established biannual seminar series that brings contemporary investigators from developmental and clinical psychology together with practicing analysts. The goal of the seminar is to explore empirical lines of work that offer natural bridges to psychoanalytic theory, and, by so doing, open up opportunities for psychoanalysts to become more engaged as participants, consultants, and informed consumers of developmental research. This is surely an ambitious goal, perhaps more than a biannual seminar can hope to achieve, but there is growing interest in innovative research methods within the psychoanalytic community.

There is also an increasing interest in and evidence of confluence between a number of branches of natural and social sciences and psychoanalytic ideas when these are placed in an empirical context. We believe the psychoanalytic community benefits from interdisciplinary input: Research ideas have an invigorating effect on clinicians, and ideas originating in the clinical realm have the potential to inform scientific research. Yet, psychoanalytically informed empirical research is still at an early stage of development. There are numerous historical and epistemological reasons for the relative paucity of this aspect of psychoanalysis but important among these is that psychoanalysis is no longer a subject of academic study among those institutions whose declared mission is research and the education of young scholars. Thus, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic institutes are often troublesomely isolated from the critical give and take of academic discourse and especially from the opportunity to listen to and inform research programs that are addressing developmental domains central to the psychoanalytic theory of mind.

It is critical for progress within psychoanalysis that we begin to formulate developmental questions that are central to our field's intellectual domain—the emergence of mind. We must rekindle