Editor’s Note

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Lucy LaFarge, my predecessor at The Psychoanalytic Quarterly whose tenure was cut short in 2024 due to a recurrence of metastatic cancer (see Katz and Colombo 2025). We honor her in the manner that we believe she would want to be remembered, through a serious consideration of the ideas that were most central to her psychoanalytic legacy. In LaFarge’s own words, those ideas centered on “knowing and being known” (Wheeler Vega, p. 476). While this clinical and theoretical focus is evident in nearly every paper that she published, we feel LaFarge’s distinctive way of approaching this subject emerged most clearly in “The Imaginer and the Imagined,” originally published in the Quarterly in 2004. In this issue, we revisit this paper along with commentaries by five colleagues who she held in high regard and worked with closely, either in an editorial role or—in Wheeler Vega’s case—also as a training analyst.

While she was originally trained in the ego psychological tradition, LaFarge’s writing has always included an admixture of contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, particularly Klein, Winnicott, and Bion. Rather than mere eclecticism, LaFarge’s integration of these theories has a distinctiveness that sets her apart from others who draw from the same well of analytic wisdom. In “The Imaginer and The Imagined,” as in her other writings, she focuses on analytic stalemates that arise with patients unable to relate to their analyst as a receptive, containing object, and conversely whose analysts find themselves unable to freely associate and respond productively to their patient. Like other contemporary analytic writers, LaFarge draws on Bion’s concept of the container and the contained as a way of conceptualizing this clinical problem—many patients come to treatment lacking an early experience of feeling adequately known by their primary objects and thus lack the foundation necessary for managing painful emotions and providing a temp