From the Editor

My summer reading involves a novel by an author whose name I cannot seem to remember. It is as if the author is trying to evade me, and for brief moments I have the uncomfortable feeling that this might be an intentional evasion. Even though this is not a bestseller or an author well known in this country, it is hard to believe that this experience is the result of mere unfamiliarity. As I delve deeper into the story, turning the pages of print, I constantly interrupt myself, turning back to the front cover to reacquaint myself with the author's name, as if knowing the name provides some form of entry into the novel that I will not have through merely reading the text.

The story in this case does happen to be dreamy and hypnotic, encouraging the reader to venture not just into the story, but the story creating itself through the meeting of author and reader. This is a psychoanalytic text—one that can capture the experience (albeit fleeting) of living life in the world and its concurrent unconscious registers. This is the kind of text (and I use the term “text” loosely to include articles, interviews, and books) that psychoanalysis has befriended and that invites us into its rich and fertile fabric. There is something loose or promiscuous about such texts, where fixed identity is not assumed, the protagonist and antagonist are not defined or perhaps entirely clear, and yet something of substance is conveyed, an aspect or slice of life cut in a way that we had not quite thought possible and yet had at some point fleetingly experienced.

The issue of conveying the fullness of life's experiences while maintaining the privacy of the protagonist is the issue of confidentiality. How do we communicate between each other as clinicians so as to learn and not become isolated, without giving away the sanctity that privacy affords both us and our patients within the boundaries of our consulting rooms?

Privacy and confidentiality are cornerstones of psychoanalytic practice, and yet t