Editorial: “What Would Dana have Done?”

The beginning of 2024 was marked for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis by our first online conference, on 13 January. For this I chose the theme of celebrating the works of my predecessor, Dana Birksted-Breen. Four authors from different parts of the world and dialects of psychoanalysis, closely connected in their professional working lives with Dana and the Journal, gave memorable papers in which they selected aspects of her work that had particularly interested and moved them: Lucy LaFarge from New York, Patrick Miller from Paris, Elias de Rocha Barros from São Paulo, and Catalina Bronstein from London. The icing on this memorable cake, so to speak, was the presence of Dana herself. This could not be taken for granted, for Dana was severely ill with cancer: but she was very present that day in her typically striking, lively and insightful comments throughout the conference.

This event was deeply symbolic of so much about Dana. She spent so much of her energy in assisting others to write psychoanalytically, pushing them to go further than their original thoughts. She was doing it again, in the very act of the conference. But she herself was such an inspired clinician and theoretician – and she was also doing that again, as she spoke at some length, developing her own thoughts at the same time as inspiring others to do the same.

Then the day came – on 1 June this year – when Dana died. We were bereaved of a figure who had been central in the workings of the Journal – first as Book Review Editor, and then as the Editor-in-Chief for 15 years. As I wrote in my Editorial of Issue 4 this year (Grier 2024), we had all been deeply affected by her profound love of psychoanalysis. She had taught many of us, including me, so very much more than just “the ropes” of our tasks within the orbit of the Journal.

In a very real sense, her spirit lives on. This is no pious platitude: many of us, having been taught by her, quite consciously turn to her in our minds when we are