Arnold Richards: An Appreciation

It is customary to hail an outgoing editor of a journal like JAPA by reminding readers how well he has discharged the responsibilities he was charged with. Thus, we applaud Arnold Richards for encouraging the submission, and supervising the selection, of high-quality contributions from a full spectrum of viewpoints in every area of psychoanalytic interest—clinical, theoretical, experimental, child, applied, historical, educational, and organizational. He recruited an editorial board that ensured the representation of perspectives from all over the physical and theoretical map, made sure to include talented, younger members of the profession as well as tried and true judges, and faithfully respected their judgments. And he has made free use of experts outside the field to appraise work on less familiar topics.

But to say that Arnold Richards has ably discharged his responsibilities is a comic understatement that will bring a smile to the face of anyone who knows him or the journal. Having turned the organization's newsletter into The American Psychoanalyst, he went on to embrace JAPA with the kind of creative passion usually seen in an artist's projection of a lifetime oeuvre. There was no aspect of the journal he took simply for granted, no possibility radiating from it that his unsleeping imagination didn't spy out and follow up. His manifold skills—intellectual, esthetic, professional, collegial, communicative, managerial, and marketing—were all brought to bear. He wanted subscribers to look forward to each issue of the journal as an enticing event in itself, besides adding value to the archive. Understanding that esthetic appeal plays a role in that, he developed a fresh, contemporary format, using lively color that ingeniously coded numbers of each volume by season, with imaginative special dressings for anniversaries and commemorations. He tapped his broad culture and intellectual imagination to ferret out a wide variety of illustrations, histo