Prologue

This Issue is the Second to Emerge from A yearly Seminar on the interface between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. Each of the articles in this issue touches on themes of intergenerational continuities and discontinuities of early experience, enduring styles of relating to others that are partially rooted in those early experiences, and resilience versus risk. These are encouraging times for the interface between the empirical science of developmental studies and the clinical science of individual case work— both informed by psychoanalytic theory and models of the mind. Attachment perspectives have offered an especially fruitful ground for bringing the empirical and clinical world together. As each of these articles illustrates, attachment theory not only has gained a strong empirical base but offers valuable clinical insight on how individuals mentally assimilate, remodel, and live in the present with important past relationships.

Another commonality across these articles is the power of the longitudinal design or of life stories from the clinical setting observed and told over many years. Methodologically, the longitudinal design is perhaps the most powerful approach to addressing questions regarding prediction, continuity, and discontinuity. At the same time, longitudinal studies require careful attention to the needs of participants—to their relationships to the study staff, to the crises and successes in their lives, and to those details that give meaning to relationships over time. The studies illustrated by these articles provide moving examples of a humane longitudinal design where investigators are closely involved in the life stories of their studies' participants.

A final commonality across the articles are models of intergenerational relationships and attachments among teachers and their students. Each of the discussants has a mentoring or collegial relationship to the primary author—as a predoctoral or postdoctoral fellow, a younger colleague,