Introduction

Theorizing about gender goes to the heart of psychoanalytic theory and practice and simultaneously cuts across multiple disciplines. Articles on gender have been proliferating in the literature, but have been scattered, with little opportunity for sustained inquiry or interdisciplinary dialogue. Gender and Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal provides a much-needed forum.

Many talented individuals, including some of the foremost contributors to the field, have enthusiastically joined the Editorial Board and have collaborated closely to give birth to this innovative journal. While psychoanalytically informed, we represent different disciplines, theoretical perspectives and ideologies, and are committed to full, open exploration of the complexities of gender.

We recognize that theorizing about gender, if not in its infancy, is still in its early stages of development and that our ideas are provisional. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud's comments about his own evolving theory are relevant in this regard:

The true beginning of scientific activity consists … in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone. Such ideas—which will later become the basic concepts of the science—are still more indispensable as the material is further worked over. They must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the nature of conventions—although everything depends on thei