Editorial

The current issue is our first ‘Number 3’ as we increase our rate of publication from two issues per year. Psychoanalysis, at its slim front line, continues to develop, alter and re-navigate the clinical situation, add nuance to its concepts, cross-fertilize its traditions and, more hesitantly, justify its presence to new social constituencies. At the same time it rapidly accumulates an archive of historically obsolete, neglected or forgotten formations. It is the interaction between these two - a new gaze cast on an increasingly complex, intriguing and culturally revealing back-story - which allows our particular field to continue to expand. There is simply too much interesting work being submitted to the journal now to fit our former model of two issues per volume. The container has burst to allow new thinking to be thought.

This general issue touches on the politics of child analysis; a re-evaluation of the early career of Melitta Schmideberg; tracks the lineage of neuropsychoanalysis from Freud and John Hughlings Jackson to the present, via the triune brain theory of Paul MacLean; and explores the misfit in Freud's reception of sadism and masochism. Carolyn Laubender's ‘On Good Authority’ probes the emerging contours of Anna Freud's project, in its Viennese context of the 1920s and 30s, to argue that at this key juncture for the future of psychoanalysis - the future of the organization is effectively bound to the education of the child at this point - certain political concerns to do with the nature of power and authority are bonded into the clinical dimensions of Freud's practice. Much debate has been focused on the political dimensions of the conflict between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein in Britain in the 1940s; but Laubender here directs us to a neglected dimension within the developing trajectory of child psychoanalysis - this is the way in which anxieties about governance