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To the Editor:
Editors are not people. This "fact" has been evidently clear throughout the long history of publishing, particularly in regard to scientific journals. If they are not people, then what are they? Perhaps they are archetypes sent by the Muses to protect the sacred writings from profanation—to establish standards like veritable cherubin to block the Gates of Eden to mortal man's return. The superego function of journal editors has long been assumed by all of us writers or would-be writers, and, despite our wounded narcissism and agony over rejections, we have never questioned their authority, only what we believed was the misuse of their authority. Now at last an editor steps aside from his august role, takes off his mask, and shares with us the self-reflection of his lonely office (Feiner, 1987). He lets us in on his own "editor's countertransference" as well as his own objective criteria for decision making. I found that I was deeply moved by the content of this contribution. I finally began to have a glimmer of understanding of what it must be like to be in that decisive position. Dr. Feiner has clearly explicated his own credo and its derivative decision-making template whereby he may stamp either "Imprimatur" or "Non Imprimatur" on contributions. In so doing, he has richly contributed to our understanding of the analysis of text as text; in other words, he has broadened our hermeneutic purview.
After my first reading of his contribution, I found myself thinking of Bion's (1970) concept of the Establishment and its relationship to his Grid. Bion believes that thought begins as pure