Editorial

When we encounter conflict it is always a re-encounter - or so psychoanalysis would have us expect. Warfare, civil and social unrest, the threat of attack and technologies of destruction can provoke anxious, violent or dissociative responses from deep inside the psychology of an internal history. But as historians we are also aware of how we turn to accounts of previous conflicts - or they become newly pertinent - in search of an understanding, or a perspective, at a time when understanding and perspective seemingly implode. For this reason, it seems no coincidence that four out of our five main pieces at the opening of 2024 focus on the psychosocial parameters of twentieth-century conflicts. They resonate with each other but also diverge in thought-provoking ways. At the heart of this issue - and perhaps providing a notional historical starting point for the web of political, military and civil anxiety gathered together - are two linked pieces tracing the way Karin Stephen (psychoanalyst, philosopher, Bloomsbury modernist, and early supporter of Klein) wrestled with the meaning of aggression, tyranny and conflict from the First World War through to the 1930s-1940s, when she developed a series of original reflections on the superego, fascism and human misery. The first of these pieces is by Janet Sayers and Helen Tyson and sets out the broader context for Stephen's intellectual and psychoanalytic development, focusing in particular on her ongoing concern with rebelliousness, in the context of the troubled and shifting social and political landscapes riven by multiple forms of conflict: the two world wars, but also pacifism versus militarism (the article begins with the story of Stephen's activism during the war, and the way she helped her husband Adrian Stephen - brother of Virginia Woolf - surmount a tribunal investigating his conscientious objection); women versus patriarchy; organizational tyranny versus individual liberty; sexual experimentation versus moral con