ABSTRACT
It is a particular pleasure as well as a great honour to be able to contribute a few words to this celebration of Bob Wailerstein's work. When Robbins left Topeka in 1958, Wallerstein took on its sole leadership, until he also departed from Topeka in 1966. The basic methodology was influenced by Helen Sargent and Wayne Holtzman and, more indirectly, by John Benjamin. The early brain trust of the project included, in addition to Bob Wallerstein, Lester Luborsky, Gardner Murphy, Helen Sargent, Lewis Robbins, and Gerald Ehrenreich. Wallerstein supervised, coordinated, and consulted on all aspects of the project, continually meeting with the various teams working on patient, treatment, and situational variables; and he developed new methodological approaches as well as hypotheses for specific analyses of the material throughout all that time. Bob was able to keep in the Psychotherapy Research project some rather idiosyncratic characters, while enabling their considerable skills to come into maximum play.
