Editorial

 … Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you.

(Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett)

The experience of time has been disorganized by the pandemic, too fast and too slow, or even ‘out of time’, waiting time. The uncanny experience of the world situation, an unleashing of the furies.

I chose Penelope from the myth of Ulysses for the cover of the Journal this year because temporality is not only always at the heart of psychoanalysis (Birksted-Breen, 2016) – at the juncture and disjuncture between conscious and unconscious – but takes on new experiential forms in the current situation.

Referring to Penelope’s weaving, Laplanche mentions Homer’s use of the Greek word for ‘undoing’, which is the same word as ‘analysing’, and he points out that unweaving is necessary in order to create a new fabric (Laplanche, 1999). It is part of the work of mourning. Unpicking the tapestry in order to omnipotently stop time (Birksted-Breen, 2003), or unweaving in order to create something new, depending on the capacity to mourn.

The new experience of enforced remote sessions during the pandemic has enabled the possibility of ‘unpicking’ the threads of the components of our usual setting, enabling authors to develop ideas about what is normally left silent. It seems creativity isn’t lacking in these times of enforced restrictions, giving rise to papers concerned with the new situation. In this issue, Jonathan Lear rereads Freud’s paper ‘On Transience’, and shows how it might be read differently in the time of the pandemic with the thought of a world-catastrophe in mind. Rosine Perelberg looks at how telephone analysis can lead to important analytic developments.

In this issue, we are also very pleased to announce the winners of the IJP Prize for the best paper related to the coronavirus crisis. The prize was announced last May and we received a large number of interesting submissions. In the end, two papers shared the