Editor's Note

As we begin our twentieth year of publication, we look forward to bringing to you, our readers, a continuing selection of high quality papers and special issues in applied psychoanalysis.

Continuing in our journal's emphasis on publishing papers concerning social problems, we are pleased to share with you that for our June, 2018 issue-in keeping with our journal's international reach-we have scheduled a special issue guest edited by psychoanalyst Pamela Nathan of Australia regarding an important applied psychoanalytic project involving work with the colonized and suffering indigenous aboriginal peoples of Australia. By the same token, our September 2018 special issue, edited by members of our editorial board, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber and Henri Parens, concerns the trauma of migration of refugees, and includes the work of contributors from both Europe and South America.

Our first issue of this year opens with the fourth and final paper in an important series on a “psychoanalytic concept of community” authored by Eugen Koh and Stuart W. Twemlow, and focuses on the question of psychoanalytically defining and describing a well functioning community. Emphasizing such dimensions as a community's capacity to process internal tension and conflict, its social defense against anxiety, and its adaptability to change and challenges in its environment, Koh and Twemlow bring us significant depth-psychological understanding of what is involved in a community's being “well-functioning”. And, again, as was said in the Editor's Note of 14:4 of this journal, the body of work of all four papers in this series, is a must read for all mental health professionals involved in applied psychoanalytic community work.

Karim Dajani, in another original contribution to the psychoanalytic literature on human migration, which follows on his ground-breaking paper published in 14:4 of this journal entitled “The Ego's Habitus: An Examination of the Role Culture Plays in Structuring the Ego”, argues c