Preface

In assuming the editorship of American Imago in the fall of 2001, I signaled the direction in which I sought to lead the journal by giving my inaugural issue the title “The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Human Sciences.” Since that time, I have succeeded in implementing three major changes: including a limited number of book reviews in each issue, often with a dialogical component; inviting a distinguished colleague to serve as guest editor for the annual Fall issue; and always assembling the papers around a unifying theme, thus making every issue of the journal a “special issue.” (Some prospective contributors, incidentally, have told me that they were under the impression that this means the articles published in American Imago are solicited. This is not the case. As is true of this issue, almost every essay comes in “over the transom,” and I depend on the Derridean principle that la glu de l'alé fait sens—the glue of randomness makes meaning—to impose my secondary revision on the primary process generated by the submissions we receive.)

Now, as we begin a new calendar year, I am pleased to be able to announce that, with the support of The Johns Hopkins University Press, we are changing the subtitle of American Imago from Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture to Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences. My reasons for wishing to place this fresh stamp on the journal were spelled out in my maiden Preface. In brief, although it is customary to oppose the Geisteswissenschaften or “human sciences” to the Naturwissenschaften or “natural sciences,” the very act of positing an antimony between the “human” and “natural” sciences paradoxically also brings these terms into conjunction.1 The effect is to raise fundamental questions about the disciplinary identity of psychoanalysis. Is it a purely hermeneutic endeavor? A natural science? A combination of both?