Editorial

Nous ne cherchons jamais les choses, mais la recherche des choses.

The work of the mind in research and discovery does not consist only in a continuous application to the quest for a solution.

As the journal of record, we are pleased to be publishing the six Keynote Papers commissioned by the program committee of the IPA Congress, taking place in Boston in July this year. In advance of the Congress, this issue of the International Journal starts with a ‘Letter From Boston’ written by Ellen Pinsky, Janet Noonan, and Anton Kris.

We are also pleased to be publishing in this issue the group of papers which were accepted following peer review in response to the Call for Papers on Research. The aim of doing the Call for Papers was to get a sense of where our discipline has arrived in this very controversial domain.

My own only personal foray into systematic empirical research was for a doctorate in the late '60s and early '70s. I wanted to see if it was possible to test empirically some psychoanalytic ideas, looking specifically at changes in women with the birth of a first child. At the time I was most struck by the difficulty of finding sufficiently adequate methods which could have meaning in relation to the complexity of psychic change understood psychoanalytically. Also of striking interest in the results of the empirical study on changes in women with the birth of a first child was the contradicted hypothesis relating to a measure of ‘femininity’. It turned out that the women who came out more ‘masculine’ on a measure of femininity-masculinity were the ones who fared best with having a first child - they were the healthiest in the months after the birth of their first child, on various measures. This is in fact not surprising, since the measure of ‘masculinity’ (based on some of Erikson's work) on closer inspection, included what one might think of as a sense of agency, while the ‘femininity’ end was probably picking up on depression/passivit