A View from the Bridge

TEN YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE I assumed the editorship of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. This is a short span of time compared to the "century of psychoanalysis," and yet provides me with a metaphoric "view from the bridge" from which I would like to survey what has come across my horizon and how the intellectual shape of psychoanalysis appears in this ultimate decade of the century.

There are many familiar themes that persist which are receiving renewed emphasis and closer examination in the recent literature. There are also new themes, which are relatively unfamiliar, awaiting our scrutiny. I have been in an excellent position to watch the passing vessels. The "viewpoint" is broad because the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association, represent a large intellectual and scholarly sea on which new ideas and old ideas meet, collide, and pass each other.

When, initially, I came to my position, we were at the height of a number of controversies in psychoanalysis. Kohut and self psychology had center stage both at our meetings and on our Journal pages. At the same time, those adherents to what is now known as the classical model of psychoanalysis with its specific focus on intrapsychic variables had also begun to modify their ideas and were self-scrutinizing. The separation-individuation movement was at its apogee and one wondered what would happen with the passing of its originator, Margaret S. Mahler, even as one wondered what would happen to self psychology with the passing of its captain, Heinz Kohut. There was still a good deal of belief that constructions and reconstructions represented aspects of the remembered past, while there were