Editor's Note

It is a privilege and a pleasure to introduce this September issue-which begins with a significant, landmark paper, “What would Freud have made of it? Notes on a ‘normal pathological organization’ within contemporary psychoanalysis,” by Martin Kemp and Eliana Pinto. This paper addresses how discussions regarding the topic of the ongoing situation in historic Palestine manifest within the culture of psychoanalysis itself. Kemp and Pinto's work is a particularly timely and insightful contribution to the applied psychoanalytic literature on this subject because of heated and intense controversies that have erupted in various psychoanalytic organizations on both sides of the Atlantic in the recent past when the topic of Israel/Palestine has entered the discourse among colleagues.

Salman Akhtar's editor's note introducing the Book Review section, entitled “Human Goodness” reminds us that Freud's dark view of human nature, has been modified in modern psychoanalysis, bringing more balanced and benign views of human psychology to psychoanalytic thinking; as exemplified in Akhtar's work (, , ), in Michal Barnea-Astrog's book, Psychoanalytic and Buddhist Reflections on Gentleness: Sensitivity, fear and the drive toward truth (2019), as well as in Philip Stokoe's The Curiosity Drive: Our need for inquisitive thinking (2020). The two latter works are reviewed here by Glebs Troscenkovs.

Film Review Editor, Tom Wolman, brings us Jamie Ruers’ insightful and creative review of David Lynch's classic 2001 film, entitled “Mulholland Drive and society of the spectacle” in which she skillfully develops the theme of how the socially more recent realm of fantasy-i.e., social media (the other realm of fantasy referred to here is Diane's dream in the film) “enables us to curate ourselves, alternative to our lived realities” and brings an historically unknown performative dimension to the lives of those who participate in it.

Following the above rich, varied, and thought-provoking papers and re