Editorial

We complete the last issue for this year, and in looking at the year as a whole, it certainly could be described, on the one hand, as globally catastrophic, but in another, more positive sense, it feels as if we're not on the edge of a fiscal cliff (as it is called in U.S. politics), but that we're on the edge of a values cliff-inasmuch as what is important to us as a global economy IS quickly becoming global politics, in that we are thoroughly inter-dependent, yet we try as nation states to remain separate with fundamentally differing values. Issues like whether love of a religious prophet in some countries should be respected by all countries are reaching into the very internal life of the human psyche. We suspect that and many other idiosyncratic issues are likely to become major in the next decade or so, as we become more and more interdependent.

If one wants a more positive view of the values cliff, let's call it instead a necessary ascension into commonly held values which would include many of the elements of the American constitution and the European economic and political community together with even the possibility of a powerful world government network with different countries following their local needs. These issues may be much closer to us now than they have been even in 2011. We can't think of a period in time when the world has been in such a state of flux wherein whole economies are collapsing, in which political forces are causing massive, torturous, and unthinkable casualties to the indigenous people; and, in which attempts at being democratic frighten politicians so much that they return to dictatorial methodologies. Although history reports similar catastrophic changes over the centuries, there is none like this with the technical support for relatively easy annihilation of the planet.

It seems to us that there are some very critical matters that need exploration by the thinking community of psychoanalysts who are interested in community based wor