Editors' Preface

In April, 1989, the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association (APA) held its ninth annual Spring Meeting in Boston. The theme of the conference was: Current Controversies in Psychoanalysis: Theory, Practice, Research and Training. Over a period of 4 days nearly 200 papers (selected from an initial submission of more than 400) covering all aspects of the conference theme were presented. The quality and diversity of the papers represented a dramatic demonstration of how far Division 39 had come in its brief, 9-year existence. Coinciding with the settlement of the lawsuit brought by psychologists against the American Psychoanalytic Association and its co-defendants, the conference and its papers were a celebration of the capacity of psychologists to fully embrace psychoanalysis as their own.

Following the conference, the Board of Directors of Division 39 authorized the publication of a special supplement to the Division's Journal, based on the papers presented at the Spring Meeting. The three guest editors for the supplement were members of the committee which organized the Spring Meeting. In selecting among the papers submitted to us for consideration, we have endeavored to remain true to the theme of the 1989 conference; that is, to frame as clearly as possible the current controversies that enliven our field. We believe that these papers, blind reviewed and selected for overall quality and contribution to knowledge, perform this task well.

Nearly 40 years ago Ernst Kris asserted that psychoanalytic constructs must be modified from time to time in order to retain their usefulness. He described an ideal of “continuous attempts to unify detailed observations by an explanatory framework and to revise the theory thus obtained in the light of new empirical data or impressions” (Kris, 1952, pp. 13-14). In that spirit, the authors of the papers in this special supplementary issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology make detailed observations and look