Recent Developments by Moraitis, George;

of the evolution of the perspectives on phobias and proceed to identify with clinical examples two kinds of phobias, those which are part of a larger symptom complex and those which represent the core of the neurosis and can be compared to perversion. The authors emphasize the importance of the attachment to the phobic object, which accounts for its dangerousness. Barbara Rocah offers a presentation and discussion of an unsuccessful analysis of a severely phobic patient as a basis for suggesting that the phobia was an example of traumatic neurosis that has triggered a systemic disease containing “an admixture of conflictual, post-traumatic dysfunctional, and dysregulatory elements, as well as characterological adaptations to these developmental vicissitudes.” As I mentioned earlier, David Spira’s paper is offered to provide an opportunity to consider Freud’s long struggle to master the complexities of phobias. In closing the issue, Joseph Lichtenberg reviews its contributions and places phobias into the broad context of anxiety and its developmental vicissitudes. Lichtenberg deciphers important questions raised by our contributors, directly or indirectly, and offers his own integrating schema. This issue has been prepared in the hope that it will offer its readers a good deal to reflect on that will be of assistance in their efforts to cope with the sense of strangeness and bewilderment that the phobic symptom and its tenacity arouses in the analyst. Furthermore, it is hoped