When the history of the field of infant mental health is written, it will be clear that Louis Sander is one on whose shoulders many have stood. All of the contributors to this journal issue, as well as many others who could not be included, have used Sander's seminal thinking to greatly enrich the field, building on his ideas in their own creative endeavors. As the reader may surmise from the title, I do not wish to limit his influence solely to the field of infant mental health, for I believe as time passes, it will be appreciated that his ideas have and will have had a profound effect on the discipline in which he began his journey in the world of mental health. I speak here of psychoanalysis, my field as well.
It was through a workshop at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society on infant research, founded in 1988, that I came to know Sander and his work. In 1993, after a symposium entitled "First relationships, Later Therapies," where work was presented from the Boston University Longitudinal Study which he directed, he and I agreed to discuss a severely disturbed patient in psychoanalytic therapy, someone with whom I felt I had exhausted virtually all psychoanalytic, psychotherapeutic, and pharmacotherapeutic wisdom in efforts to keep her alive. We have presented the very encouraging results of our collaboration to psychoanalytic clinicians to demonstrate alternative ways of conceptualizing and working with such patients.
In 1995, when Daniel and Nadia Stern were in Boston, we created a small group of infant researchers and adult psychoanalytic clinicians to explore in depth how knowledge of developmental process could creatively inform psychoanalytic therapies and understanding of change in treatment. This small group, now known as the Change Process Study Group of Boston, greatly expanded and enriched the work that Sander and I had begun together. Both Sander and Stern, being psychoanalysts as well, offered another point of integration. The fruits of these efforts, publications, presentations, and symposia are now beginning to reach a wider audience (Lyons-Ruth, 1999;Stern et al.,