Editor’s Note

On October 14, 2025, Nancy Chodorow passed away from lymphoma, just two weeks after completing the details for publishing her final paper, “Freud in His Psychosocial Generation: Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, and Du Bois.” This paper represents a capstone on her long and distinguished career as a pioneering feminist and renowned sociologist and psychoanalyst. In the waning days of her life, Nancy’s husband, Dr. Carl Salzman, wrote that news of the imminent publication of this paper was “the best news in a difficult time,” as Nancy saw her paper as offering a final chance to integrate the distinctive, paradoxical strands that defined her professional identity. As she wrote in her 2020 book, The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye, “I want something close to a one-person clinical psychoanalysis and theory…yet I argue for a psychoanalytic sociology and sociological understanding of the psychoanalytic dyad and psychoanalytic institutions” (Chodorow 2020, p. xx). While in her view human subjectivity is fundamentally rooted in a social and relational context, “it is the perspective of the individual subject that is most at stake” (p. xiv).

Writing this paper offered Chodorow an opportunity to include the perspective of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose works she had only begun to read in recent years, inspired by her involvement with the Holmes Commission. “Like most of my generation, I was not taught to think of W. E. B. Du Bois as a founder of sociology and psychosocial thinking, just as my psychoanalytic training here in San Francisco did not include Takeo Doi, Franz Fanon, or Sudhir Kakar” (p. 202). Nancy took this paper as an opportunity to offer belated recognition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s central role as…

…part of a remarkable generation, all of whom attended to the relations between psyche and society…. Freud, followed by

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the sociologists Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. These men were all born, beginning with Freud, within eight years of one another between 185