Editors' Afterword to the Forum on Social Justice and Psychoanalysis

Well, there they are, the best cases that the disputants in this incendiary controversy can present. Did a justifiable degree of light emerge along with the interspersed blasts of volcanic heat? Should we editors have ignored the controversy altogether?

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” George Orwell controversially opined.1 That Orwell's remark could be regarded as controversial is a sign of the times. We are quite content to let the Forum exchanges speak for themselves, except for the small matter of one respondent who merrily impugns the editors. In this fervid atmosphere, any accusation, unanswered, will be seized upon as true, so answer there must be.

There is no deterring some aspirant sages from blazing straight ahead into a buzzsaw of their very own making. In Carter J. Carter's response to the Burston/Nelson paper and to the journal editors one beholds a chap exhibiting every trait that he purports to disprove about his opponents' case against what is often termed (elements of) “woke” or, in this case, “critical social justice theory” (CJST) whose proponents are negatively portrayed as illiberal, smug, siloed, intolerant, basking in self-bestowed virtue, and imbued with special pleading that exempts themselves from scrutiny while granting license to vilify whomever they please. Encountering Carter is meeting a would-be Inspector Javert who can't help displaying his inner Inspector Clouseau.

Behold what mostly (though not all) right-wing sources label CJST, whose adherents endorse, according to a patently right-wing website immediately appearing on anyone's Google search, progressive values, such as seeking remedies for racial, ethnic creedal, sexual, disability and class injustice, all of which we heartily endorse as social priorities.2 Carter commences to perform a curious sleight-of-hand feat in which he