Editorial

This issue of the journal carries ‘general’ content - that is, dictated by what has been submitted during the last period - but as often happens the articles fall into a particular constellation. In this case three of the main pieces, those by Mary Jacobus, John Zilcosky and Janet Sayers, appear to speak to a similar problem, or knot, in the relations between psychoanalysis and culture. And yet it is one that I find hard to draw together under any simple rubric - and not just because the topics are sufficiently divergent: Freud's paper on the uncanny in relation to World War I; the motif of the destruction of Rome in Civilization and its Discontents; and the post-war founding of the Imago Group in Britain. Rather, there is the sense in each of these pieces that psychoanalysis and culture - even when the gaze of psychoanalysis is fixed attentively and perceptively on culture - are ships passing in the night, in this case ships at war. But the war is not between cultural thinkers or producers and psychoanalysts. It is at some obscure point in the psyche's dialogue with itself via culture, and no understanding of repression, the Unbehagen of culture, or the need for a transformed or enlightened culture, seems sophisticated or attentive enough to really illuminate this blind spot.

Let me expand in more detail. Each of these first three articles takes place in the context of war. Freud's ‘Uncanny’ paper was written at the tail end of World War I and published in 1919; Civilization and its Discontents was published in the uneasy years leading up to World War II (and Jacobus reads this text very much in the harsh nachträgliche light of the time to come); the Imago Group was founded in Britain immediately post-World War II, and was very much shaped (so Janet Sayers uncovers) by a set of utopian desires to mobilize the experience gained through analysis culturally and socially, such that war could not happen again with such mindless ferocity. In each case, psychoanalysis, ‘cu