From the Editors

In this first issue of 2023, we offer a sampling of psychoanalytic authors’ efforts to illuminate—in ways both artistic and scholarly—matters of interest to us as clinicians, as lifelong students of psychoanalysis, and as citizens of the contemporary world. We begin with two book essays, each on two psychoanalyst-authors’ ventures into creative territory: a novel for young adults, a memoir, and two novels for adult readers.

An avid reader of psychoanalysts’ forays into creative territory, Sybil Houlding views one experience—a teenage girl's loss of her mother— through two lenses: Kerry Malawista's young adult novel Meet the Moon and Irene Hoge Smith's memoir The Good Poetic Mother. Houlding characterizes as “good-enough” the mother that Malawista's fictional protagonist—Jody, a young teen—loses to death in a shocking car crash. Jody has a good deal of support from surviving family and from the community at large. By contrast, Hoge Smith's real-life mother abandoned her family when the memoirist was a young teen, fleeing a “bullying and neglectful” husband for another man, a prominent poet (whose inscription in a book gifted to Hoge Smith's mother provides the memoir its title). Unlike Malawista's fictional character, Hoge Smith was largely on her own to navigate adolescence after her mother abandoned the family. Reflecting on any clinician's role in helping a teen through maternal loss, Houlding writes of these two books that they “remind us … where maternal loss is part of the history … each person is unique, each outcome is uncertain.”

Seeing the World: Now and Then, Without and Within

Barbara Stimmel contributes a thoughtful essay on two novels written by psychoanalysts: The Distance from Home, by Dan Jacobs, and Memory's Eyes: A New York Oedipus Novel, by Cordelia SchmidtHellerau. Stimmel invites us to consider what is distinct about novels

written by psychoanalysts: Is it simply that Jacobs and Schmidt-Hellerau happen to be psychoana