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In this first research-oriented section of 2004, we begin a new tradition for JAPA—the regular publication of papers, abstracts, and letters designed to acquaint our readers with contemporary research initiatives relevant to current questions in psychoanalysis. These questions arise out of psychoanalytic theory, education, and clinical practice. Reflecting the spectrum of psychoanalytic topics, each section will aim to incorporate state-of-the-art research approaches from all relevant disciplines—social science, neuroscience, the humanities, and psychiatry. While this new section surely builds on several research issues that have appeared on an annual basis in the last three years (JAPA 49/1, 50/2, 51/3), it will differ with respect to its more frequent appearance in future volumes and in our commitment to initiate—through outstanding contemporary papers and other contributions—lively dialogue among clinicians, scholars, and educators who read both JAPA and literature from allied disciplines. Besides focusing on the “enduring dialectic between body and mind” (, p. 745), we will attend to other crucial interfaces between contexts and individual development; narrative, ethnographic and quantitative approaches; and psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Each of these interfaces points to many rich philosophical and scientific problems. Through our addressing the range of compelling ideas underlying these dialectics, psychoanalytic scholars and practitioners will attain new clarity on contemporary psychoanalytic controversies while discovering creative collaborations with scientists and scholars from related fields.
Emblematic of the intellectual excitement now surrounding psychoanalytic topics are the three subsections included here: (1) an original paper reporting findings about two distinct psychoanalytically