It's All In The Timing

In an effort to make the Journal reflect more accurately the most current developments in psychoanalysis, and to speed up the sometimes glacial pace of discussion and debate within the field, a number of changes have been instituted over the past year. These include the streamlining of editorial and production procedures (through the use of E-mail, etc.) to decrease the time elapsing between acceptance of a paper and its publication. Two fruits of this effort are to be found in the current issue. In a new format—Opinion—Joseph Schachter and Sandra Cohen comment on themes touched on repeatedly in the issue, thereby opening the floor for debate at the very outset, while all but one of the letters published here address issues raised by papers appearing in JAPA in the past six months. This significant improvement in response time will both focus debate and move it along, as will the inclusion of replies to two of the letters. Contributors are encouraged to use E-mail (see instructions on the inside cover) so that increasingly JAPA can serve as an open forum for all that is best and newest in psycho-analytic thought.

Readers will note that with this issue JAPA receives a typographic makeover, rendering its interior design consistent with the new cover. Type of the same size will now be used for contributions in all categories—papers, panel reports, book reviews, and letters.

JAPA receives also an infusion of new blood, as six new members join the Editorial Board. Elected by the Executive Council last May to terms beginning in 1995, they are Gerald Fogel of New York, Arnold Goldberg of Chicago, and—all from Boston—James Barron, Steven Cooper, Judith Kantrowitz, and William Meissner. (Perhaps Freud was guilty only of a little hyperbole when in 1910 he wrote the Harvard neurologist James Jackson Putnam, imploring him to accept the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association, then in the process of formation. “I understand,” Freud gushed, “that all important intelle