Psychoanalysis in the Culture

And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year … it shall be a jubilee unto you.

If psychoanalysis has a birth year, it is fair to think it 1897, the year that Freud made a world-shaking revolutionary breakthrough in his self-analysis. It was then that he carried Socrates' injunction to know oneself farther than any before had, working incisively beyond childhood fantasies of innocent victimhood to recognize his own forbidden urges and desires, those that lay behind his terrors. Regarding his earlier misconceptions, he then wrote Fliess, “I shall not tell it in Gath, or publish it in the streets of Askalon, in the land of the Philistines—but between ourselves I have a feeling more of triumph than of defeat (which cannot be right)” (Freud 1954, p. 17).1

Science and humanism both require knowledge to be shared in order for civilization to move forward. Fortunately, Freud did tell of what he learned and did originate a tradition of psychoanalytic publication. In the years since Freud, our literature has grown through open discourse, with observations and ideas shared, criticized, altered, and extended. For half a century, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association has been at the forefront of facilitating that