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After an extremely successful round of panels at the annual Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere Conference on the theme of “Authoritarianism in All Its Guises: Left, Right and Centre” over the weekend of 30 September − 1 October, in collaboration with our splendid accomplices at the London Freud Museum, we continue in this issue very much in the same vein with a highly contentious but, we think, illuminating Forum on social justice and psychoanalysis, which plumbs a fierce debate that erupted in the United States, spurred on even more so by awful events ongoing in the Middle East.
Prior to entering that sulfurous portal, we also can offer readers a fascinating essay by Chris Joannidis on the not so esoteric subject of evil in modern psychoanalytic thought as well as a superb and stringent debunking of twins research (and its genetic determinist agenda) by Jay Joseph.
The Forum is organized around an intensely provocative paper by Daniel Burston and Cary Nelson, who valiantly consented to subject it to unrestrained (and sometimes intemperate) scrutiny far above and beyond the call of duty. We are very grateful to Bob Hinshelwood, Martin Kemp, Andrew B. Klafter, Carter J. Carter, C. Jama Adams, and Douglas Kirsner for ably answering the call as respondents, even if civility occasionally faltered in the advancing of their arguments. One cannot come away from the fray without a deeper understanding of the issues, the rationales, and the stakes. We reserve further comments on the Forum for the Editors' Afterword.