Opening Doors: Reflections of a Former JAPA Editor

Let the voices multiply; the more voices we have, the more truth will finally emerge.

I am honored and pleased to have been invited by Steve Levy to write about my experience as editor of JAPA from 1994 to 2003. When I took office, I knew that I had large shoes to fill. The editors of JAPA over its first forty years (John Frosch, Harold Blum, and Ted Shapiro) had made it the premier psychoanalytic journal in United States. But when I took office, the psychoanalytic landscape—organizational, political, and clinical—was a very different place than it had been in their time.

JAPA was founded in 1953. Then, and for many years after, its parent organization, APsaA, was essentially the only game on this side of the Atlantic. There were other psychoanalytic organizations in this country and other avenues to psychoanalytic training. But APsaA had all the advantages in age, size, and weight. APsaA was Freud's heir; he still loomed over it heavily in the persons of the emigré analysts who had been close to him in Europe. Circumscribed by the insistence of its founder, A. A. Brill, on developing psychoanalysis as a medical specialty, APsaA held tight to a sharply focused vision of psychoanalysis, the only one (as APsaA saw it) faithful to its origins. These were fat years at APsaA. There were plenty of patients and plenty of candidates. Psychoanalysis was respected almost to the point of adulation in some quarters, and the psychoanalytic worldview did not confine itself to the clinical. It was influential in the academy, and was explored with excitement in popular books and movies as well. The APsaA of the fifties and sixties was a theoretically narrow but very powerful organization, and its immensely prestigious journal was the natural stage for its most powerful members.

In the decade of Harold Blum's editorship , American-trained analysts came into new prominence and the topographic model gave way to the structural model. Psychoanalysis, however, wa