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As current editor of JAPA, I have had the role of guiding APsaA's scholarly journal through a period of challenge to all things psychoanalytic. JAPA has responded with format changes, new ventures, a broadening of theoretical allegiances on its editorial board, and other innovations designed to keep psychoanalytic scholarship current, responsive to adjacent disciplines, and welcoming of new talent and new perspectives. In this essay I will offer my take on what is new and important, what is old and still important, where JAPA has been and where it needs to go. A mix of celebration and manifesto, it is meant to convey the joys and challenges of psychoanalytic scholarship that make editing JAPA the fantastic experience it is.
On assuming the editorship in 2003, what quickly became apparent to me was that all my “good,” forward-looking ideas had origins in the work of the editors who preceded me at the helm of JAPA (see Blum 2011; Shapiro 2011; Richards 2011). Putting my stamp on the journal meant further developing ideas my predecessors had already introduced. That there are few truly new ideas is not only tempering of my ambitions, but is pertinent to considering the value of manuscripts not solely in relation to their novelty. Psychoanalysis is a conservative enterprise. Our knowledge is hard-won and requires constant defense against a public and a scientific community ever ready to dismiss what Freud referred to as his unsavory ideas. There are pieces that describe the already well known but do so in contemporary and compelling ways that deserve to be read and thought about. Fashions within psychoanalysis certainly change. The other day, a somewhat obsessional patient of mine was telling me about a carefully disguised struggle he was having with a colleague in his workplace. He characteristically spoke in a halting, overmethodical way, with frequent throat clearings, subliminal grunts and groans. There were subtle connections to contentious issues about which he and