Editorial

The final issue of 2023 is a general issue which brings together three substantial articles, each concerned with the problems and complexities of the transmission of psychoanalysis - across national and cultural borders, inserted into geopolitical environments riven by conflict and trauma, and as itself a theory of the problem of transmission. The investigation begins with an account involving fantasies of Aboriginal maternal cannibalism emerging at the intersection of Kleinian psychoanalysis and Australian settler colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s. In ‘“A Child Is Being Eaten”: Psychoanalysis in Times of Antiblackness’, Marita Vyrgioti delves into the colonial archive of Géza Róheim and in particular his stay at Alice Springs in Central Australia where he collected accounts of dreams, myths and child-rearing practices amongst the Arrente, Luritja and Pitjentara peoples. Vyrgioti focuses on the strange twinning in Róheim's account of a vision of the Central Australian Aboriginal as free of anxiety due to a childhood in which the maternal breast (crucial for ego development) was ever-accessible, due to the ‘yielding’ nature of mothers as well as the social organization of breastfeeding into a communal practice, and a much darker portrait which uncovers the presence of fantasies around the mother's instinctive wish to devour the infant, which are in turn linked to stories surfacing at the time about alleged practices of infanticide. Vyrgioti's article sensitively unravels the knot of psychoanalytic ethnographic theorizing in these antiblack contexts, which is enmeshed in discourses of the colonial state - around cannibalized children and ‘animalized’ mothers, ‘embodying how the future of colonial nationhood was in jeopardy due to Aboriginal motherhood’ - and yet, even so, in Róheim's hands proves capable of issuing in positive assertions about the Aboriginal child's ‘capacity to survive’ in times of hunger.

In the second piece, ‘The Ambivalent Translator: Towards a Hi