In these Pages …

We open the pages of this Journal issue with a consideration of the challenges encountered by three generations of professional women. Marianne Horney Eckardt begins with the challenge faced by her mother, Karen Horney, the founder of an immensely helpful theoretical school of psychoanalysis, of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, and of this Journal. Horney rebelled against the prohibitions placed on women. Of these, the acquisition of advanced education and professional training was foremost. Waging an uphill battle, Horney became a physician, a psychiatrist, and a psychoanalyst. Eckardt provides us with a glimpse of Horney's personality—a daughter's reflections on her famous and sometimes difficult mother. Eckardt, unlike her mother, had no need to battle immense odds in order to gain entrance to these same professions. In Eckardt's generation, however, motherhood had become rather a more self-conscious endeavor: Mothers were now regarded as holding the key to their offspring's well-being. The challenge had shifted to managing the dual expectations of sustaining a professional life and being a successful mother. Whereas for Eckardt it was simply assumed that she would accommodate her professional and domestic life to her husband's career needs, for Eckardt's daughter a growing equality between the sexes created a new challenge, namely, the sustaining of family unity when husband and wife face divergent career options. Marriage and career were no longer invariably compatible. Eckardt offers no easy solution, only the pursuit of “the elusive art of quality in living.”

Swerving rather sharply from memoir to theory, we join Lois Shawver, who in her earlier work published in this Journal (1996, 1998) provided largely instructional papers for the psychoanalyst seeking to adapt postmodernism and Lacanian theory to clinical work. In her current paper, which retains her care for the reader's struggle to understand, Shawver explains logocentric closure and how Freud'