Preface

Each of the essays in this unusually copious issue of American Imago explores the perennial psychoanalytic theme of the complex interplay between outer and inner worlds, between the social matrix and psychic space. At the same time, each essay not only deploys a sophisticated theoretical perspective, but also displays an exemplary capacity for critical self-consciousness that extends even to the point of view being espoused by the author or authors.

Citing Freud's “On Transience” as a precedent, Karl Figlio and Barry Richards practice a mode of “experiential theorizing” that utilizes two personal experiences—one a child gazing at the lights of his native city from a car by night, the other a demonstration against the mistreatment of animals that unexpectedly confronted shoppers on a busy Greenwich street—as a springboard to reflect on the way that “social life is lived, assimilated to personal experience, and personal experience is, from the outset, social.” Whereas the effect of the first example was to produce a feeling of “benign connectedness,” the second aroused “primitive anxieties”; but both incidents are characterized by “the stirring into awareness of an unconscious social matrix.” Figlio and Richards are led to open up broad questions such as the relations between technological change and fantasy formations as well as between democracy and tyranny. Influenced most deeply by Klein, Bion, and Meltzer, the authors provisionally align the contrasting visions of the social order in their two vignettes with the optimism of Winnicott and the pessimism of Freud, while striving to respect the tension between the “unsettling effects” of psychoanalysis and its capacity to provide “a prolific source of images of hope.”

The essay of Figlio and Richards implicitly reminds us that the literal meaning of matrix is “womb,” or, more generally, “that within which, or within and from which, something