Editor’s Introduction

This issue, my last as Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, comes at a time when many of us are deeply unsettled not only about our world but, more locally, about the nature of what psychoanalysts do and what we will be doing in the future.

The events of 2020 have shaken us out of our complacency about much of what we thought were simple facts of life. The horrific behavior of our leaders, and its consequences, have made it impossible to continue to disavow the systemic racism that has endured and even flourished in the post-civil rights era; increasingly we must acknowledge our personal and organizational complicity. At the same time, and with more immediate consequences for our daily work, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to abandon – without the opportunity to plan or even to reflect – our century-old assumptions about the psychoanalytic frame and perhaps about the psychoanalytic project itself. The converging crises created a sea change, forcing us to acknowledge as we never have the ways in which privilege and self-interest, largely unattended or denied, shape the nature of everything that we do and everything about how we think about what we do.

It will be a long time before the implications, or even the meanings, of what we are living through can be understood; as psychoanalysts we are well positioned to appreciate that meanings emerge après coup. What we do know as this issue goes to press is that we are all acutely aware of the uncertainty of our future as a profession and as an intellectual discipline; it is an uncertainty that inevitably raises crucial but as yet unanswerable questions about the nature of our past.

I started to have thoughts about what I would like my last issue of the Quarterly to be more than two years ago, long before the events that have so unsettled us were even on the horizon. The planning began when I was thinking about my ten years as Editor, as I reflected on the ways in which the landscape of psychoanalysis has been changi