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I have been looking forward to the publication of John Beebes paper, ‘Editing as a psychological practice’ since it was first trailed around a year ago. I am an editor myself, married to a psychotherapist, engaged in research on the editing role. Although both the academy and mass media comment regularly on the author, the poor old editor—working mostly behind the scenes—scarcely gets a mention. So one falls on examples of interest with enthusiasm.
Now that the paper has appeared, I find that it does indeed offer something valuable. But it also goes off on tangents that are puzzling for anyone familiar with editing and writing practice. And so, in the spirit of the article, I would like to offer some comments and questions that may help draw out further the writer's meaning.
The first question concerns the way in which Beebe's editing, and Fordham's before him, is described as being unusually deep. For example, after showing how certain passages of Andrew Samuels's work were rewritten or cut, Beebe writes that there was ‘a certain fearlessness around the intrusion of my own personality in a sort of dialogue on the page with the author. Many readers might assume […] that most authors would not be able to tolerate this much editing’.
However, the kind of editing that Beebe describes—while clearly of an exacting and high standard—is not as unusual as he appears to think. There is always a sliding scale of intervention and diplomacy, but for a professional editor—and by professional I mean someone working to a set of standards, rather than just providing a paid service—the final responsibility is always to the audience. For example, in the classic Editors on Editing, the editor is defined as someone ‘acting as the first truly disinterested reader’ (Gross 1993, p. 6). The responsibility is met through the text: the editor must be satisfied that the author's meaning is successfully communicated to the audience in that text, and this can involve very radical editing indeed. B