ABSTRACT
I HAVE BEEN INVOLVED with this project of collaboration between biographers and psychoanalysts ever since 1976, when George Moraitis and I first began to work together. I found the collaboration very useful myself, so I readily introduced my friend Mark Schwehn to Moraitis and recommended the collaborative method to Richard Wortman, too, although he and Moraitis were already acquainted. That was in Chicago, where George Moraitis and I also presented our findings at the Institute for Psychoanalysis. Then we led a workshop on psychoanalysis and biography at a seminar of psychoanalysts organized by Joseph Lichtenberg in Washington, D.C. Once in North Carolina, I discovered that my colleague Samuel Baron was thinking autobiographically about his biography of G. V. Plekhanov, so I recommended the collaborative method to him, too. Baron and I procured a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and organized the conference whose papers compose the present volume. Reviewing this history and my memories of it, a somewhat different perspective comes to my mind than the one George Moraitis presents in his conclusion to this book.
