In these Pages…

Like the two preceding, this Journal issue opens with a paper that considers some crucial aspect of gender and sexuality. Here, we attend to the matter of women and leadership. Ann-Louise Silver, herself a recognized leader in contemporary American psychoanalysis, acknowledges the gains of women, generally. Nevertheless, she holds a firm focus on women's meager success in penetrating that more narrow domain of leadership associated with commanding and directing others—that cherished redoubt of masculinity, the joists for glass ceilings. Silver struggles with how much this form of leadership is so thoroughly inflected with maleness that women who lead endure the very sharpest of punishments: degendering. Women who lead, by this restrictive and normative view, are not quite women.

Silver reinforces her argument in part by tracking language usage. She cites an orientational metaphor that relies on vision and verticality: “looking up to people.” This example neatly identifies how an invisibly ordinary figure of speech serves powerful regulatory functions, shaping our beliefs and organizing societal norms. This metaphor tilts leadership toward the taller, the bigger, and therefore to the sex that more generally possesses those traits. This kind of deconstruction or analysis of everyday tropes, of metaphor specifically, becomes the subject of the next paper. In this paper, I undertake a revision of how we consider the process of semantic structuring in the clinical setting. I argue there is a “poetics” of psychoanalysis, a means for listening to our patients that is assisted by a theory of discourse, including a theory of metaphor. For example, in asking, “What is in your tears,” we accomplish something different—perhaps something more—than if we ask, “What are you crying about?”

If the reader hears echoes of Lacan in this paper, she or he is also anticipating Yuan Yuan's investigation of the grotesque through Lacanian concepts. This line of investigation relies on the view