Farewell

My term as Joint Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis will end in February 2012. The experience has been challenging and frustrating at times, but it has also been exciting and rewarding.

From the beginning of my tenure I was very much aware that I was following in the footsteps of giants. Many of them I never knew, starting with the first, Ernest Jones; there were several I did know and admired - Joe Sandler, David Tuckett, Paul Williams, and Glen Gabbard. I had never met my joint editor Dana Birksted-Breen before our term started; we had to learn how to work together and to do so while working 3500 miles apart. Moreover, as we assumed the editorship, the British Society was negotiating with commercial publishers to take over many of the administrative aspects of the Journal, a process that required major transitions and that led to the current arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell.

Fortunately, we were able first to retain and then to recruit a spectacular group of Regional Editors. We started with Antonino Ferro and Elias da Rocha Barros, and then we recruited Catalina Bronstein, Jay Greenberg, Ricardo Bernardi, Sergio Lewkowicz, Jean-Michel Quinodoz, Jorge Canestri and Lucy LaFarge. They have made our work a special pleasure. We also value the experience of working with other members of our Editorial Board, a dedicated group of analysts who devote a great deal of time to the work required to uphold the Journal's high standards.

Ultimately, the quality of any journal is dependent on the quality of the submissions it receives; they are the life-blood of a journal, even though we are only able to publish a minority of the papers we review. At the International Journal it has been my honor to work with the many authors who contribute their professional work. Some of these authors enter into a continuing dialogue with the Editors as their work is refined and improved on its way to publication. A much larger number of authors have their submissions r