Editorial

Over a year ago we devoted an issue to concepts of the self. The cryptic title of one of the papers was ‘Your self: did you find it or did you make it?’. This was an article by Louis Zinkin, an iconoclastic SAP analyst who died in 1993. In the current issue we have sought responses to his question by a diverse group of analytic thinkers from many areas of the world and from a variety of professional settings. Despite this dissimilarity, the group has come together with gusto and perseverance to grapple with Zinkin's apparent antinomy.

The first paper in the issue is by Sue Austin whose approach derives from her analytic work with women's aggressive fantasies from which, as she demonstrates clinically, can emerge an intense analytic tussle. This, if managed with courage and humility by both parties, she shows can establish the grounds from which a nascent self can emerge. Roger Brooke follows, using Heidegger's concept of being-in-the-world; he re-visions Jung's idea of psyche as ‘the world in which we live psychologically’. With this in place, he envisions self as coming forth from ‘the ownership of an existence that is already situated and gathered’. In my paper I also take a Heideggerian view, saying that self-states are predicated on ontological dispositions that are actualized by my being-in ‘my world’. Going on from here I use conceptual art to demonstrate self-state destruction and reparation in the service of discursive complexity.

Ladson Hinton explicates the unique view of the French analyst Jean Laplanche, outlining with clarity and depth the concept of the enigmatic signifier as the incomprehensible projection in infancy of our parents' indecipherable sexuality. In this vein, he enumerates the lifelong limit conditions of understanding. Toshio Kawai, in a paper he gave at the Journal's recent conference in San Francisco, uses clinical examples of autistic spectrum children to show that subjectivity emerges from the dialectic of union and separation. His app