Editorial comment

It is with great excitement and a deep sense of responsibility to the history of this journal that we take over as editors from Lynne Layton and Peter Redman, our distinguished predecessors. Beginning with Mark Bracher’s founding vision, and under the able tutelage of Simon Clarke, Lynne and Peter, this journal has evolved into a distinguished and critical space for interrogating the intersections of psychoanalysis, culture and society. We live in troubled times in which, as Auestad and Treacher Kabesh (2017) note, subjectivity is being erased by rhetorics of power and coercion that seek to replace singularity and difference with blind allegiance to violent and totalitarian discourses. The power of psychoanalysis, as these authors note, is that through the mechanisms of free association new discursive possibilities are imaginable and speakable, and the possibility of political resistance is made present.

Under such conditions, not only does psychoanalysis have much to offer in formulating a critique of the neoliberal state, but, picking up threads from the Frankfurt School, which made vibrant contributions to the critiques of totalitarianism and the creep of fascism in an earlier era, there is room for new political and social critique. We are well-equipped and perhaps obligated to provide a riposte to the violence of the intransigent and monological discourses of those who manipulatively portray anything other than their received view as “fake news.”

As well as continuing the pluralistic traditions of PCS, in which diverse psychoanalytic traditions are valued, we invite contributors to develop a sustained critical encounter of the theorization of social theory, history, and politics, seeking to understand the ways in which subjectivities are

structured not only in the service of neoliberal, globalized “free markets,” but also potentially the ways in which political theory, educational practices, and the structure of mass media can lead to the undermining of agency a