A Plea for Constructive Dialogue

In “Psychoanalytic Discourse at the Turn of Our Century: A Plea for a Measure of Humility,” Arnold Richards takes his place among a small group of concerned and determined leaders in our field who feel that something has gone seriously amiss in our ability to bring civility and humility into psychoanalytic discourse. Richards suggests that a politics of exclusion in psychoanalysis has led to an intellectual discourse of dichotomy. He acknowledges the exclusionary history of the American Psychoanalytic Association, which he believes led interpersonal psychoanalysis to develop in isolation and resentment, and he sees these exclusionary policies as having created a professional trauma of sorts from which we are all still suffering. Richards sees this particular moment in our professional history as an especially advantageous one for the “mending offences” and “building of bridges.” With the opening up of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the development and elaboration of a relational perspective and the founding of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Richards believes that the time has come to forgo old resentments and dichotomous ways of thinking and to engage in collaborative and constructive dialogue.

As editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, we wholeheartedly agree with Richards. Our journal was founded, by the late Stephen Mitchell, on the notion of organizing papers into discussions involving authors of varied theoretical backgrounds and institutional affiliations. Indeed, in the introduction to the issue in which we assumed editorship of the journal we wrote that “there is sometimes a fine line between fostering awareness of differences and contributing to divisiveness. Divisiveness, the highlighting of differences in the service of political ends, battles over turf, can be recognized by a lack of respect for the