From the Editors

This issue is an invitation to consider the psychoanalytic imagination. How does psychoanalysis invite us into lively discourse with new ideas or with various disciplines? Each of the essays and reviews we offer here aims to engage the imagination, whether in the realm of theory, in adjacent fields of study, in psychoanalytic history, or in the life and death of the psychoanalyst. “A universe can open up from an instant, if you'll just look at it and spend time with it,” psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear told journalist Daniel Oppenheimer (2025). Lear died before we could publish the review of his book Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. In this issue, we celebrate his last book and specifically his gift to us of the central notion of radical hope. Radical hope draws on the human capacity to imagine, to mourn, and to revisit the imaginative, intellectual, and profoundly human richness of the past to fortify our capacity to engage with an imagined future—one in which we can find meaning, expand creativity and compassion, and strive to lead an ethical life. We are grateful for his legacy.

In her book essay, “Before There Were Words, There Was Music,” Nields turns a psychoanalytic lens on the richness of music, capturing the notion of music as something “inscribed in us, experienced in a bodily and primal way.” Engaging with three significant books about music and

psychoanalysis, Melodies of the Mind: Connections Between Psychoanalysis and Music, Choices in Music Beyond the Pandemic: Musical and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, both by Julie Jaffee Nagel, and H