Editorial

For most of us, working as psychoanalysts is lonely work. While most of our professional hours involve close, intensive, and intimate involvement with patients, we have minimal opportunities to digest, contemplate, and extend our experiencing and thinking within ourselves, … especially with colleagues who are similarly engaged in this mode of living.

Scientific meetings, while attempting to satisfy the need for intellectual interchange and stimulation, largely serve the other important antidote of our secluded working, namely social communicating and reaffirming group identity. Often, we may find ourselves in a fluctuating struggle trying to satisfy both sets of needs, with emotional needs usually transcending. At the same time, we are being stimulated by ideas, critiques, research methods and data, clinical presentations, and reformulations of theoretical constructs. Once back in our offices, their impact often recedes.

A journal provides us with the opportunity for continued exposure at our own time and pace and is a vehicle for readers to become responding participants. We always look to the older and more experienced writers to share with us their clinical maturity and fruits of all the years they have spent organizing their ideas and living as psychoanalysts. In addition to these invaluable contributions, we feel that our evolution and viability depends on tapping the wealth of potential material that can be forthcoming from the lesser known among us.

The foregoing has been directed towards the clinician. The researchers amongst us have always been more at ease in presenting their data and thinking because of what is felt to be the generalizability of their formulations. As clinicians, we are living with a world of data that we may mistakenly feel is not noteworthy enough to write about.

As we are more open to our clinical experiences, we may find newly interesting dynamics underlying behavior and unusual etiological factors, child-family relationships, interaction