Editor’s Note

I assume the editorship of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly at a time when the vision of the analyst, traditionally focused upon psychic reality, must find a relation with massive, unpredictable changes in the external world. How can we contend with such changes individually and as a field? How do we locate ourselves within the flow of events? From what vantage points can we perceive the events we inhabit? How can we communicate these to others?

Freud, of course, encountered the same problem, developing his invention in a century shattered by two world wars. And although this finds little place in its early papers, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly itself was launched in 1932, during the Great Depression. How then can we begin in the middle of an ever-changing world?

It is useful, I think, to start by considering Freud’s advice to the patient, from his 1913 paper, “On beginning the treatment”: “Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside” (p. 134). Freud’s railway image is so familiar to us that it has lost its power, but if we return to it and re-open it to interrogation, we can see that it contains many of the questions that we encounter at the present moment.

Freud appeals to the patient as the observer of the patient’s own free associations, derivatives of his psychic reality. The analyst does not have direct access to these; he learns primarily what the patient reports. If we construct a picture in our minds of Freud’s image, we see the patient beside the window, looking out at the changing scene, and the analyst beside or behind him, listening, but not seeing out. This image, which views the scene from the perspective of the analyst, captures something essential about the analytic process: what the analyst learns is filtered through the patient’s subjectivity. The analyst constructs her version of the patient and his

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