From the Editors

In these days of quarantine, we find family, friends, and patients often returning to pleasures of the past for solace. We've heard citations from favorite television shows of yore (“Remember that I Love Lucy episode when Lucy climbed into the vat of grapes …?”), and held tight to reassuring figures from the not-so-distant past (a Ruth Bader Ginsburg doll clutched in the hands of a three-year-old during a Zoom call, a comfort as much to her parents as to the child herself). We yearn for beloved figures who survived the travails of the past—childhood heroes who make us feel safe and understood, who can help us keep hold of the good in the world, even amid constant reminders of the bad. In keeping with this need, we are pleased to revisit the work of two psychoanalytic icons in this issue: Donald Winnicott (who survived—and helped others survive—the physical and emotional horrors of two world wars) and Edith Jacobson (whose imprisonment by the Nazis informed her thinking). Winnicott's influence has spread throughout the psychoanalytic world, and crossed into the zeitgeist; it informs the work of at least two graphic novelists, Alison Bechdel (reviewed by Rebecca Chaplan in JAPA 62/4) and Sarah Boxer (reviewed in this issue). Jacobson's work—and her successors' debt to it—is somewhat less well-known; as our reviewer suggests, this may be due in part to the “missing transatlantic link of a complete English translation.”

We are proud to launch in this issue a series of reviews of an important, recent publication: twelve edited volumes encompassing the work of D. W. Winnicott. This impressive collection offers an opportunity to reflect on what is most enduring about both psychoanalytic thought and the inner workings of children's minds. As a writer and a psychoanalyst, Winnicott brought to public attention some basic truths about children's emotional well-being: that they require adults who will listen, heeding