From the Editor

If we look around us at the world of managed care and other quick-fix solutions, it is easy to feel that the place for deeper, imaginative thinking about internal life is being managed away. Perhaps psychoanalysis will always be outside mainstream acceptance. Maybe this is for the good if it indicates psychoanalysis' continued willingness to explore the ways in which society colludes in the production of its own mental illness.

But if we look behind our office doors and see, for instance, the increasing numbers of disturbed patients who have been invited to lie on our couches, then we see where psychoanalysis is alive, and how it struggles to make its influence felt where it matters most. It is also heartening to look over to academia, where psychoanalysis has been revisited over past decades and re-vitalized by its incorporation into various academic curricula such as history, literature, philosophy, and architecture. This year's student paper is a fine example of this growing relationship. It is written by Homay King, a student of rhetoric, and it is about film and psychoanalysis. Likewise two other papers, one by Richard Toft, with a discussion by Michael Robbins, and the other, by Richard Lichtman, explore connections between philosophical and psychoanalytic thinking. These are our local contributors for this issue. From farther afield, in Britain, we have papers by two independent thinkers, Ronald Britton and Patrick Casement. Dr. Britton offers us a thought provoking expansion of the clinical understanding of different types of narcisissm, and Dr. Casement keeps the theory of mounring alive for us through his clear and unencumbered clinical writing.