Editor’s Note

Since its inception at the close of the 19^th century, psychoanalysis has been a field defined by a tension running between certainty and the unknown, orthodoxy and innovation. In our clinical practice we offer patients the opportunity to know their mind in all its complexity by providing a medium for radically free expression, the achievement of which requires the analyst to embrace an openness to the not-yet-known. And yet, ironically, the history of our field is punctuated by periodic clashes of orthodoxy, of warring absolutisms. It is perhaps to be expected that confrontation with the unknowable so often elicits a ceaseless yearning for certainty, a hunger for orthodoxy, particularly during times of heightened anxiety.

Alongside the proliferation of the multiplicity of ideas that deepen our understanding, the continuation of our profession as a coherent discipline depends on what Joseph Sandler (1983) once described as the “very necessary conservative trend” (p. 35) that resists change and holds us together. The tension between tradition and innovation, coherence and disjunction, security and patience (Bion 1970) has shaped the evolution of our discipline from the start. It is now over seventy-five years since the Freud-Klein controversies erupted within organized psychoanalysis while war raged across the continent. It was a battle between orthodoxies out of which emerged a creative tension that allowed for the return of the unknown in the form (ultimately) of Bion’s O and Winnicott’s (1963) “music of the spheres” (p. 192).

To remain vital, psychoanalytic publications need to continually rediscover the balance point between tradition and change in our field. We are a discipline, perhaps more than any other, that grounds itself in the writings and discoveries of its founder. At the same time, we are a field whose practice is defined by an uneasy confrontation with the not-yet-known in

ourselves and others. As I have argued in the pages of this Journal, Freud’s gr