The IJP “Key Papers” series brings together the most important psychoanalytic papers in the Journal’s eighty-year history, in a series of accessible monographs. The idea behind the series is to approach the IJP’s intellectual resource from a variety of perspectives in order to highlight important domains of psychoanalytic enquiry. It is hoped that these volumes will be of interest to psychoanalysts, students of the discipline and, in particular, to those who work and write from an interdisciplinary standpoint. The ways in which the papers in the monographs are grouped will vary: for example, a number of “themed” monographs will take as their subject important psychoanalytic topics, while others will stress interdisciplinary links (between neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy etc., and psychoanalysis). Still others will contain review essays on, for example, film and psychoanalysis, art and psychoanalysis and the worldwide IJP Internet Discussion Group, which debates important papers before they appear in the printed journal (cf. www.ijpa.org). The aim of all the monographs is to provide the reader with a substantive contribution of the highest quality that reflects the principal concerns of contemporary psychoanalysts and those with whom they are in dialogue. This volume is the second within the “Key Papers” series that identifies, reproduces, and discusses the most influential psychoanalytic papers produced in each decade since IJP began. By “influential” we mean papers that not only made an important individual contribution to psychoanalytic knowledge at the time, but also went on to influence the development of psychoanalytic thinking and concepts. The objective of this and future volumes in the “decades” collection will be to provide an overview of the development of psychoanalysis, as articulated through its principal scholarly journal.
We hope you will find this and all the “Key Papers” monographs rewarding and pleasurable to read.
Paul Williams and Glen O. Gabbard
Joint Editors-in-Chief,
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
London, 2004