New Directions In This And Future Issues

For some time now the Editorial team at the Journal has been seeking to explore the limits that might apply to conducting reasoned international and cross-cultural peer review. The importance of anonymously conducted peer review for the development of a healthy discipline which develops reasoned confidence in some ideas and is able to reject others was alluded to in a Guest Editorial by Michels (1995, 76: 217-235) and in subsequent policy statements (1995, 76: 653-662). The practical issue has been how to achieve peer review in an international and pluralistic discipline that in its first hundred years has paid insufficient attention to its methodological foundations and is often noted for ideological schism and reliance on argument by appeal to authority.

For some years the Editorial Boards in each region have been arranging for colleagues first independently to assess and write reports on a series of papers and then to discuss and debate the results. A joint meeting of all the Boards also attempted this for the first time at the San Francisco Congress. This has been followed both by a joint meeting of the UK and European Boards and by a series of meetings in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. In the latter series various members of the Editorial Boards from several regions have taken part in the discussion and assessment of several pre-circulated papers together with those members of local societies who cared to do so. These efforts will be continuing.

These various meetings, spanning cultures and continents, have convinced us that it is possible to achieve a large measure of informed agreement on the fundamentals required to develop a common international standard for evaluating psychoanalytic papers. Such agreement is possible when we move from abstract discussion of possible differences to the concrete task of deciding about a particular paper. Evaluation must also be conducted suspending personal agreement or disagreement with a paper and by trying t