Editor's Report

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

We see and then we try and put into words what we have seen. The photographer and the painter both try to convey what they have seen, framed by a border and then available for others to edit through their visual field and memory. The photos, the canvases, and the paper all offer images and words that lead to the imagination of experience as seen through our own eyes and felt through our very being.

Except, perhaps, for the best known and read writers, a part of every writer probably wonders if his or her writing will be read by anyone. First comes the question of being seen and read and then comes the question as to whether it was understood. The first question invites the issue of what details were noticed — the ones that were there to be seen and those that were obscured or absent. The second question is always shaped by the first in that the writer often does not want to be completely understood and seen; it would leave little room for the reader to wonder and imagine, to inhabit the story themselves, to leave the original to the private world of the author. Perhaps the most successful writing or conversation is when the audience is left in a place that the author has not yet imagined.

When we listen to our patients, we are not only interested in the stories they tell us, but which details they have chosen to remember, and there is a palpable difference between those details that are still evolving and those that are static and lifeless. It is a difference between narrative life and death. Stories that recall life's difficulties but do not bring them to