Editorial for Issue 2, 2022

I am greatly honoured to become Editor-In-Chief of the International Journal. I have been involved with the IJP since 2005, reviewing many papers on a whole host of different subjects and from all the different regions of psychoanalysis, and from 2017 becoming the UK Regional Editor. Since then I have worked very closely with the other editors, especially with Dana Birksted-Breen.

I owe Dana an enormous debt of gratitude. Most of what I have learned about editing I have learned from her, and over the years I have also been absorbing her love of international psychoanalytic scholarship, her curiosity about the myriad, different forms that psychoanalytic theory and clinical work take in different regions of the world and in different theoretical groupings, the immense influence of language and culture on different psychoanalytic dialects and ways of communicating, ways of collaborating and indeed ways of fighting. Dana has a remarkable ability to combine a kind of respectful empathy and tolerance, with an exceedingly sharp capacity for critique. She has insisted on the crucial importance of weighing up the quality of argumentation in any paper, so that, for example, it is possible to admire the positive level of argumentation even when one may hold strongly conflicting views from the author’s, and, contrariwise, although one may feel oneself to be close to an author’s attitude, one may have to perceive that the author’s argumentation is nevertheless of poor quality.

This is at the heart of the mission of the International Journal, to set out within one journal very different expressions of psychoanalytic issues and, even, of psychoanalysis itself. Our field has become fragmented, dangerously so, so that it is now very difficult for different psychoanalytic schools to engage meaningfully with one another. Much engagement happens within psychoanalytic groupings, which to some extent are co-terminous with geographical areas, and leads to a sense of people only talking to e