From the Editors

In this issue, we are pleased to present several essays that we hope will speak to the challenges of post-pandemic reckoning—with ourselves and with each other, and in conversations emerging within our profession—as we each seek to make sense of what the past year has wrought. As psychoanalysts, we have a unique obligation to bring our attention, curiosity, and analytic thought to the troubles that have laid themselves bare through the wreckage of Covid-19. In the spirit of such inquiry, we are pleased to introduce an occasional series of reviews and essays called Psychoanalysis Present Tense. Here we inaugurate the series with three reviews whose authors each train a psychoanalytic eye on books addressing topics of pressing contemporary importance. We invite readers to contact us with suggestions for this series, on topics including race, class, and caste; climate change; economic inequality; shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality; and the impact of technology on human experience.

We are also excited to announce an occasional series called Classics Re-Viewed, in which we will spotlight classic works and explore their contemporary influence. Please watch future issues for the first entry in this series: an essay in which Michael Parsons revisits the work of Enid Balint—a major presence in his early career—from the perspective of his own psychoanalytic maturity. Readers are encouraged to bring us their suggestions for this series as well.

We hope that these two series—one forward-looking, the other historically focused—will bring the intellectual foundations of psychoanalysis into conversation with the urgent demands of the present moment. We look forward to hearing from you.

This issue of Review of Books begins with the sixth installment in a series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, curated by guest editors Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris. In a review essay on Volume 6—