From the Editor: The Editor and the Author

Although being editor of a psychoanalytic journal has its triais and tribulations, it is also a very special honor and privilege and a source of satisfaction. For me the position of editor is a culmination of a process which started as simple love for the written word. Because of reasons that I would discover later in my own analysis, I developed, during my early youth, a predilection for the printed word. It was a constructive escape. It allowed me into, as it happens so often in adolescence, the wonderful worlds of fantasy and imagination. I thought the written word to have special powers. It seemed so carefully thought out and enduring as opposed to the spoken word, which seemed ephemeral and transient, usually superficial. Compared to the printed word, speaking seemed to have a pedestrian quality. Writings seemed to have depth and the quality of being accessible again and again and—at least in theory—to an infinite audience. That is how the written word first impresssed me.

I would later discover both healthy and neurotic reasons behind my love for written words. But as time went on, I discovered the tales of history, the puzzles of philosophy, and the wonders of science. When I was in medical school I discovered and fell in love with Freud. Most of my reading of Freud I did as an extracurricular activity in the context of a small group of interested—and I must say interesting—friends. I then saw, and still do, psychoanalysis as offering a major challenge in the area of medicine; I decided to become a psychoanalyst. With the exception of student journalism and a brief period of political journalism, whatever I have written so far, does mostly have to do with psychoanalysis.

Let me first say that although there is art in our practice, I see psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise, and one for which words are the matter at hand. What we do for a living is mostly listening to the spoken word. Through it we get trained and train those who come after us. Whenever we