Arthur H. Feiner 1922-2005

Contemporary psychoanalysis was Arthur H. Feiner's journal, and in an important sense it still is. It was Art's baby, his pride and joy. The journal was founded by Max Deutscher and Rose Spiegel in 1964; but Art took over the editorship a few years later and held the job for a remarkable twenty-five years, from 1970 through 1995. He took the journal from its origins to its status as the international journal it has now been for many decades.

Art didn't have an editorial board to help him. He could have, of course, but he preferred to keep his hand firmly on the tiller. He had an enormous appetite for the work of editing. (Remember, most of Art's twenty-five years took place before the computer era. Even when the personal computer came of age, Art preferred to work by hand.) He sent manuscripts out for blind review, as we still do; but he was the one who received all those reviews and wrote all those letters to the authors of the manuscripts. He did almost all of the editing. (“Almost” because Darlene Ehrenberg served as his assistant editor for twenty years, and there were others, notably Clark Sugg, who made editorial contributions along the way.) Art made suggestions to writers about their manuscripts and sent the papers back and forth until they were ready to be published. The journal didn't have a copyeditor in those years. Whatever copyediting was done, it was Art who did it. He did everything.

Hard as he worked, though, Art's greatest contribution to the journal was not his labor, but his vision. He published writers whose work could not, and probably would not, have appeared in print otherwise. Some of these writers would have identified themselves as interpersonal and, eventually, relational; others would not have done so then and would not do so now. He established Contemporary Psychoanalysis as the open-minded, curious, multitheoretical publication that it is today. The number of significant psychoanalytic writers whose first paper, or first several papers,