From the Editor

It is an honor to have been chosen to be the new Editor of JAPA and to help shepherd the journal into the next decade. The knowledge base of a profession is its heart and soul—it gives all of us reasons for doing what we do, whether it be scholarly work or clinical practice, or, often enough, both. Our knowledge base is an open, living, and evolving entity, a fertile source of dialogue and debate. JAPA has been a key player in psychoanalytic knowledge production since 1953, first functioning as the “scientific” arm of the American Psychoanalytic Association and gradually evolving—through years of inspired editorial leadership by John Frosch, Harold Blum, Ted Shapiro, Arnie Richards, Steve Levy, and Bonnie Litowitz—into a journal of impressive intellectual and geographic influence.

I am taking over editorial responsibilities from Bonnie Litowitz, who has led JAPA for the past five years with a remarkable blend of intelligence, integrity, and care. She has enlivened the journal with an ethos of intellectual open-mindedness and purposeful engagement with scholars from other disciplines and clinicians who in the past, perhaps, were kept outside the psychoanalytic pale. She has expanded JAPA's reach into Asian countries via translations of key papers, augmented JAPA's podcast offerings, and curated unusual content, such as Julia Kristeva's “Maternal Eroticism” (62/1, 2014)—efforts that, collectively, have given JAPA more theoretical dimensionality and scholarly and clinical impact (such efforts will be continued under my tenure). Bonnie has also used JAPA's relationship with Sage Publishing to contact growing numbers of readers and listeners through digital platforms. Those of us who have worked closely with her have learned a great deal, and I cannot imagine being in my current position without the benefit of her generous and wise mentorship.

In my estimation, we have as a collective become quite good at espousing particular, if not entirely idiosyncratic, points of view;