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As Editors we are proud to present to you the launch issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (PCS), formerly called The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (JPCS). With this issue, we celebrate a number of things: our move to Palgrave Macmillan Journals, our new editorial and international advisory boards of renowned academics and clinicians from around the world, and our new format. To create and celebrate this launch issue, we decided to ask members of our boards, including the board of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society (APCS), to write about their views on the relation between the psychic and the social worlds. As you will see, several of the essays are position papers, some of which are quite personal. As a group, they more than fulfill the mission of the journal, which is to embrace all schools of psychoanalysis and to focus our efforts on the way in which psychoanalysis can help us not only to understand the cultural problems that beset us but also to effect positive social change.
In keeping with our wish to publish clinical as well as academic psychoanalytic papers, this issue contains Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's (chair of the board of APCS and member of the international advisory board of the journal) conceptualization of the variety of forms of child maltreatment and how they intertwine. Her case example shows the limitations of the usual nosological categories of child abuse. Kareen Ror Malone (an associate editor of PCS) and Shannon D. Kelly critique, from a Lacanian perspective, a recently published relational clinical paper on the psychic effects of changes in family structure. Their larger purpose is to caution against the importation into clinical work of ideological frameworks, even when those frameworks are “alternative.” Also bridging the clinical and the academic worlds is the paper by Lynne Layton (editor of PCS), which elaborates a relational view of unconscious processes and argues that the kinds of p