JAPA on the Cutting Edge

Psychoanalysis in the United States and abroad has been marked by periods of consolidation and periods of expansion. Freud has been faulted by some for his tight hold on its organizational and institutional development during his lifetime, but his efforts may have been necessary to assure the survival of his revolutionary discipline. Similarly, the sponsoring organization of this journal, the American Psychoanalytic Association, has been faulted in the past for exclusionary practices and overly rigid organizational and credentialing structures. But as Marvin Margolis states in the presidential address that opens this issue, the association has moved during the past two decades from consolidation to expansion, liberalization, and greater openness in matters both intellectual and organizational.

Some think that psychoanalysis is under siege, both as a science and as a therapeutic practice. Others feel, as I do, that our discipline rests on a solid basis of knowledge about the human psyche, and that this knowledge should be disseminated among the broader scientific community and the general public.

This issue, the first of our forty-ninth year of continuous publication, includes two papers that even before their publication here have received attention from the popular media. Edward Jeffery's study on the longevity of psychoanalysts was the subject of a piece on WebMD (an Internet health site) and in the New York Post. Brian Johnson, who contributes a study on addiction, dreaming, and drive, has been interviewed at length by a national news magazine. We are grateful to Dottie Jeffries, the association's media consultant, and Leon Hoffman, chair of its Public Information Committee, for their untiring efforts to assure that studies such as these receive the wide notice they deserve.

The research papers in this issue, which are introduced by Wilma Bucci, demonstrate once again that JAPA is on the cutting edge of psychoanalytic science. On page 340 we list some of the papers