You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When Herbert S. Strean lost his valiant struggle with the melanoma to which he finally succumbed in the summer of 2001, social work and psychoanalysis also lost one its foremost luminaries. Herb's contributions, spanning some forty years and including thirty-five books on topics as diverse as countertransference, the clinical use of humor, and the treatment of marital conflicts, are unsurpassed in respect to their scholarship and originality, perhaps even unparalleled. A gentle soul, he was, nevertheless, no stranger to controversy. I remember vividly the stir Herb caused some years back when he criticized Helen Harris Perlman in a national social work publication for her failure to address the topics of transference and countertransference in a book she had just published on the social work treatment relationship. Of course, to Herb, it was inconceivable that anyone, even the legendary Perlman, could write a book about “relationship” in which the central importance of the transference-countertransference matrix was barely acknowledged.
Since his passing, Herb has been memorialized in different ways by many of the organizations and other constituencies of which he was a part. The Newsletter of the National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis (NMCOP) published a moving tribute last year, as did several other social work organizations. Not long after Psychoanalytic Social Work announced its intention to showcase Herb's contributions in a special issue, we were contacted by a number of Herb's former colleagues, supervisees, and friends, all of whom were very enthusiastic about the idea. Early on, I got in touch with Herb's widow, Marcia Strean, who was also very pleased that we had decided to honor Herb in this way, and she has contributed her own eloquent and moving remembrance