From the Editor

How do we choose the stories that we are going to tell and, for that matter, the ones that we choose to read? What keeps us engaged and curious in psychological writing? What is it that stops us, making us willingly surrender our time and space?

As therapists and analysts, we hear stories, personal stories that belong to our patients, and we hold them in confidence as they do their work in the time and space afforded them. Some of these stories find the light of day in other places and times, but they are transformed. We, the listeners, digest these stories and fictions, turning them into new stories, often blurring the separation between author and audience. But, then, that is what makes a good story. Stories from the consulting room have to tread a fine line; they have to give us, the readers, a glimpse into something different, whether by virtue of perspective or content, while also preserving a privacy, a confidentiality. We are both let in and excluded at the same time. The author is trying to convey something unique or particular while paradoxically trying to preserve confidentiality. And, we want to fully feel the story without knowing who the author or protagonist is—all characters are entirely fictitious; any resemblance to people living or deceased is entirely coincidental. In the hearing or reading of stories, we either know what it is like or we have to be able to imagine it, but we do not want to be it. Maybe, in the end, good psychological writing boils down to good fiction.

There is perhaps no truth in the telling of our cases. We are not trying to convey the truth, but a truth. Perhaps, more important than whether the case really existed or the conversation unfolded as told is whether the writer truly has been able to convey some aspect of psychological life in a full and variegated form, as does a good piece of fiction. In the stories and cases we listen to and read about, it is often the out of the ordinary (not necessarily the extraordinary) that pi