Editorial

I begin out of sequence - why not in a psychoanalytic journal? - with an immersion in Jenny Willner's article, ‘The Problem of Heredity: Ferenczi's Organology and the Politics of Bioanalysis’, which was also the prompt for this issue's cover image of Chaetopoda, or bristle worms, from Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. Willner returns to the time of Ferenczi's Thalassa - not the oceanic fantasia of the origins of life, but the conflict of scientific and political perspectives over evolutionary descent in the closing decade of Wilhelmine Germany and ‘Austro-Hungarian’ Hungary (Thalassa was drafted in the winter of 1914-15). In particular, Willner focuses on the way in which, far from simply leaning on post-Lamarckian theory to bolster the psychoanalytic paradigm, Ferenczi's foray into bioanalysis intervenes in the popular discourse of Haeckel on the biogenetic law, and the ‘erotic monism’ of Wilhelm Bölsche, defamiliarizing their narratives of progression and potency, origins and futures. Just as these discourses were starting to inform eugenicist projects, Ferenczi's work rewrote the terms of evolutionary analysis using concepts drawn from the psychoanalytic study of hysteria. As with Freud's later attempt to disable both religious and anti-Semitic origin stories in his reframing of the legacy of Moses as a symptom - a historical trauma bequeathing a narrative buckled by neurosis - so, for Willner, Ferenczi's bioanalysis precludes the notion of an uncontaminated origin or descent. Organs develop throughout evolutionary time, not on the way towards - or falling short of - perfection, but through displacements and oblique changes of pathway, responding to traumas that (as with the hysteric) often evade capture through observation of the historical record alone.

From evolutionary narratives to developmental ones: Katie Joice, in the second of two articles on the use of documentary images in the theorization of post-war children's mental health, focuses on the film seq