Editorial

We are pleased that as we complete the seventeenth year of our publication, our journal has broad worldwide appeal. Translation income is quite high for this year, and Wiley seems proud of what we do. With their help, we are getting ready to propose ourselves for the Medline abstracting service. This prestigious online abstracting service will likely generate an even wider circulation of our journal and extend its availability to an even broader audience worldwide.

In keeping with our stated goal of hoping to focus on papers that apply psychoanalytic thinking to social problems, 2015 has been an exemplary year with two Special Issues in this area: James Gilligan's “Forensic Psychotherapy: Applying Psychoanalysis to the Treatment of Violent Offenders” (#2) and Nadia Ramzy's “On the Continued Intractability of the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict: Perspectives on the Occupation” (#3). Each of these special issues, the former focusing on the treatment of violent individuals, and the latter, on the ongoing sociopolitical conflict and violence inherent in the process of military occupation, deepen our knowledge and understanding of their respective subjects through the application of psychoanalytic ideas and concepts to the topics under discussion.

In the meantime, we continue to be reminded that psychoanalytic thinking is probably least valued in the United States of America, where there is a strong move to medicalize psychoanalytic research and treatment with very little money available for research grants for psychoanalytic studies, or even psychological studies, as compared to Europe, especially Germany, where psychoanalysis has high public status. Much psychoanalytic research in Germany is clinical, but, at the same time, practical, in that it involves adhering to the scientific method in a way that allows broad studies of the ultimate impact of psychoanalysis above and beyond subjective assessment by analyst and patient at the end of the treatment. In Germany, Blue Cross