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The court's main trust is to repair fractures in federal law. Because the court grants review dominantly when other jurists have divided on the meaning of a statutory or constitutional prescription, the questions we take up are rarely easy; they seldom have indubitably right answers. Yet by reasoning together at our conferences and, with more depth and precision, through circulation of, and responses to, draft opinions, we ultimately agree far more often than we sharply divide.
Arguments and differences among psychoanalysts about psychoanalytic theories are legion, and seldom have indubitably right answers. We aren't jurists, but in the interest of repairing fractures in our theories we do the functional equivalent of circulating draft opinions of passionately held beliefs in our journals in the form of scholarly papers, and invite responses—agreeing and dissenting—in the form of commentaries. The “decisions” in these matters, if we can call them that, are left to the readers, who come away with the depth and precision embedded in deeply felt and reasoned arguments. The aim in our journals isn't to agree, necessarily, or to promote a particular theory, but to broaden our understanding of theory in general, and clinical applications in particular.
In this issue Michael Diamond takes on the historically fraught mission of addressing what he characterizes as the unnecessary schism between trauma theories and mainstream psychoanalysis, a schism that in his view (and ours) persists in the field of psychoanalysis itself. While we are all in agreement that psychoanalysis began as a theory of trauma,