Editor's Introduction

Psychoanalysis was born in a conversation, and it survives today because of the enduring value of conversation in furthering human development. Maintaining conversations is among our most important professional commitments, although not everybody in today's action-oriented society shares our belief in its usefulness. A vital although indirect service that psychoanalysts provide to the broader community is to bear witness to our belief that what can be examined can be endured, never easily or painlessly but always in a way that in the end affirms our humanity.

Like our clinical work, psychoanalytic journals depend upon conversation. In a discipline that is practiced and conceptualized very differently in different geographical and academic communities, the vitality of our work depends upon the exchange of ideas.

But in psychoanalytic publishing as well as in clinical work, we must bear in mind that conversation is a goal and not a given. In his consulting room, Freud quickly discovered what every analyst quickly learns, that analytic conversations move forward only in the face of great challenge. Analysts and patients alike walk a thin line between succumbing to the commonplace and courting the unbearable.

In our broader discourse we invite discussion among analysts who work and were trained in different theoretical and clinical traditions, who live and work in different cultures, and who hold surprisingly different ideas about what a conversation should look like. These encounters with the “other” can be risky; conversation can easily devolve into premature and superficial consensus on the one hand or into rancorous hostility on the other. Both outcomes threaten conversation and invite retreat into isolation and stagnation. But as with clinical work, it is in the tensions that conversation creates that growth eventually becomes possible.

The tradition of independence that has defined The Psychoanalytic Quarterly since it was founded in 1932 puts us in a unique position