From the Editor

I have the good fortune to write this editorial from a different place and time — on vacation from the demands of day-to-day life. This is the place of fiction — the written word with the power to take us away from home and the familiar. Like a good novel, psychoanalytic articles should at least give us a glimpse into the unfamiliar; we need to get away from home to notice difference, hopefully not for its own sake, but because it's a difference that matters.

Other than the occasional picture perfect post card sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge, the summer sky in the Bay Area has a predictability: a blanket of fog or low clouds unvaried in texture or color fluctuating with days of clear blue, similarly with no depth as if continuing into infinity. Away from here, there are clouds, sometimes deep and multi-layered, signifying height and water content. Where I am, they are wispy, scratched into the sky, moisture hurled around by thermal currents I am unaware of as I sit at ground level gazing upward.

Each of the articles in this issue of fort da requires a gazing into the unfamiliar, even for those topics that are close to our hearts and minds, and therefore felt to be safe and predictable. Apology, The Wizard of Oz, theory, ethics, and the innermost sanctuary of the psyche are for most of us part of the landscape we have viewed and spent time with in our lives. How often do we want those places disturbed by that which is different or unfamiliar? Hopefully, the effort of these writers can expose each reader to a new sense of home.

Two doves on the deck railing are entwined, the head and neck of one curled around the other, preening its feathers in places unreachable for the other. There are many minutes of exchange before they dis-entwine to work separately under wing or leg. The distance between them grows as their physical contortions require ever more space, trying to locate parts of their feathered bodies seemingly impossible to reach. I don't know if it was a sound