Editor's Note

As everyone is well aware, we are in the midst of an unfolding pandemic. Each of us is affected, and though we have all had to make significant (perhaps lasting) changes in our personal and professional lives, in truth, as I write this the outcomes for each and every one of us are changing and our experiences vary. Illness, death, vigilance, complacency, boredom—these are some of the facts of life for many of us as citizens. As clinicians and psychoanalysts, we have other responsibilities as well. In future issues of JAPA we will feature writing on Covid-19 and clinical practice from a variety of settings (both in and beyond the United States), including, especially, the inevitable reframings of therapeutic purpose and the values that underwrite what it is we do and why we do it.

In this issue of JAPA we focus on trends and innovations in psychoanalytic education. Typically, recent writing on educational trends emphasizes the “market forces” that drive them (e.g., the declining number of candidates). This suggests that in the absence of such forces we would continue to teach psychoanalysis in the way we always have. Put in these terms, it is fairly easy to see that this emphasis on economic realities can obscure a far deeper question: Is psychoanalytic knowledge a universal, timeless entity that floats above and independent of the social surround and the political moment? Clearly it does not. We are all of us well aware of the ways in which the psychoanalytic view of the human person is directly affected by specific beliefs and prejudices alive within the culture. Our task is to be alert to these interactive effects, as well as to changes in the kinds of suffering we encounter in our clinical settings. Only in this way—what I think of as a recursive dialectical awareness of these interactions—can we meaningfully ask the deeper and more enduring questions about psychoanalytic values, beliefs, and assertions of fact in relation to how we educate candidates and the larg