“Stephen Moved Very, Very Fast”: Margaret Black, 2001

With deep sadness and grateful admiration, we devote this issue to the memory and legacy of our colleague, Stephen A. Mitchell. The shock of his death, more than a year past, has begun to yield to reflection and memory, and Steve has left us much to remember.

We have chosen to remember Steve by reprinting two of his earliest papers, one his very first, written in 1978, and the other written three years later. (The papers, reproduced here thanks to the generous permissions granted by the Guilford Press and the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, are in their original form except for minor editorial and stylistic changes.) Together these papers critically engage postwar American psychoanalytic theory and treatment of homosexuality. These ambitious, prescient, and morally rigorous papers are not well known. Even scholars and clinicians who are reasonably familiar with the psychoanalytic literature on homosexuality may have missed them (see Roughton, this issue). We reprint them here to honor them as crucial instances of clarity, critique, and complexity in what Steve later referred to as “a dark episode in American psychoanalysis” (Mitchell, 1997, p. 255). Beyond their contribution to work in homosexuality, these essays also show us how, from the very beginning, Steve was crafting his seminal