Editorial

The current issue leads with a special section focusing on Female Psychoanalytic Pioneers. As such it continues a trend in our recent issues (articles on Bluma Zeigarnik, Karin Stephen, Joyce Robertson and a special section on Lou Andreas-Salomé), but also reflects a burgeoning current in contemporary psychoanalytic historiography which has seen a significant revival of research on Sabina Spielrein, and the publication of Anna Borgos's monograph Women in the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis: Girls of Tomorrow, as well as a collection edited by Klara Naszkowska titled Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance, which contains papers on Margarethe Hilferding, Beata Rank, Nic Waal, Barbara Low and many others. In the present issue, Ana Tomčić uncovers neglected aspects of Melitta Schmideberg's career, particularly her pioneering work with young offenders in the United States; Christine Vickers draws on the newly recovered archive of Klára Geroe to trace for the first time some of the links between her pre-war activities in Hungary and her involvement in the launching of the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis in the 1940s; and Janka Kormos pieces together the fragmented halves of Judith Kestenberg's career – one as an innovator in child observation and movement therapy, the other as a pioneer in psychoanalytic work with Holocaust survivors.

Each analyst's journey (through childhood and education, contact with psychoanalytic ideas, trainings, orientations, methods, institutes and clinical practice) is distinct, and each article has a unique narrative to tell, taking us in one case from 1920s Budapest to Australia, and in another from Tarnow to Vienna to New York. And yet, as is clear from the way the volumes by Borgos and Naszkowska have started to map out the broader picture, there are strong affinities in these narratives. This is so both with regard to the issues faced by psychoanalysts who were women and formed their careers in the