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The need for a preface, a memoir, and an introduction before getting to the papers in this book attests to the difficulty in separating Robert
P. Knight the man from his work. He was personally a towering and influential figure. Not only was he central to the development of the Menninger Clinic into a famous center for psychiatric treatment, teaching, and research, but also he moved to an untouched, charming, western Massachusetts town and elevated a small sanitarium, the Austen Riggs Center, to a world-renowned focus of interest in a special group of patients known as borderlines. In the course of all this, Knight displayed his talent for organizational mastery in addition to the personal force necessary to superintend the evolution of these institutions. He found extraordinarily gifted people like Erik H. Erikson, Margaret Brenman-Gibson, and the late David Rapaport, held them as a team, and yet gave them a free hand to pursue their own unusual and quite individual work. In particular, during the almost twenty years when Knight was its director, the Riggs Center provided an atmosphere that did more than allow remarkable people to pursue their work separately and together. At that quiet place there was a spirit of dedication, interest, equitability, and optimism—which in view of the difficult, selected patient group was in itself noteworthy—and good humor that encouraged the inception and thinking through of ideas and, above all, that kept these high-powered abstractionists in touch with the clinical reality of the patients as human beings.
This appreciation of Knight as a leader is not intended to minimize his own work but only to put it into perspective. For his capacity to lead did not stop at the doors of Riggs or Menninger. In this volume, so ably edited by Stuart C. Miller, two of the most interesting papers, “Determinism, ‘Freedom,' and Psychotherapy” and “The Present Status of Organized Psychoanalysis in the U.S.,” which remain timely and important, were p