Editorial Introduction

This issue of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context brings together a wide range of contemporary concerns in self psychology and psychoanalytic thought: interpretation, artificial intelligence, eating disorders, postpartum healing, body analysis, relational theory, ecological selfhood, friendship, social standing, and the lived meanings of cultural or political conflict. Taken as a whole, the issue extends the range of self psychology into a variety of new questions and possibilities, revealing how alive and well self psychology is.

Jane Reid’s article puts forth the important claim that interpretation not only helps patients understand themselves but has the power to help structuralize the self. It tends to be overlooked in self psychology’s emphasis on the healing power of empathy, but Reid presents psychoanalytic interpretation as a crucial clinical instrument that helps patients give form, continuity, and meaning to previously fragmented experience. Valerie Frankfeldt presents her stunningly positive experience of using an AI therapist when her human therapist died and attempts to understand both the power and limits of AI therapy. Christina Osorio integrates self psychology and object relations theory in the treatment of anorexia, using a case study to show how eating symptoms express disturbances in self-experience, relational need, and internal object life. The culturally informed frame demonstrates that anorexia must be understood in relation to social, familial, ethnic, and cultural meanings surrounding the body, appetite, control, and identity.

Nethni Dhanapala explores postpartum experience as a period of vulnerability, fragmentation, and psychic reorganization. By bringing spiritual and creative practices into a psychoanalytic frame, the article shows how symbolic, embodied, and imaginative forms of care can help restore continuity and cohesion to the maternal self. Edward T. Novak turns to Kohut’s image of “two fingers of touch” in asking about the importance