“CREDO”: Editors' Introduction to a New Series of Essays

“Psychoanalysis and the Rite of Refusal,” an essay by Edgar Levenson, is the first in what will be an ongoing feature in the journal, where we will publish brief essays by psychoanalysts around the world in which they will formulate their current thinking about the fundamental values, idea, observations, and beliefs that shape their approach to clinical work. The idea for this project represents our attempt to revisit and extend the invitation that Emanuel Ghent proffered in his now-classic 1989 paper, “Credo: The Dialectics of One-Person and Two-Person Psychologies.”

Ghent wrote.

For many years I have tried to persuade psychoanalytic candidates embarking on a course on psychoanalytic theory to commit to writing as much as they could articulate about the theoretical beliefs they thought they held and practice by; and then at the conclusion of the course to repeat the exercise. (p. 169)

Ghent went on to explain in “Credo” that

this paper represents my own effort at articulating the beliefs (and uncertainties) that currently form the matrix of my own psychoanalytic thinking and practice. … Credo has as its focus the inevitability that every analyst theorizes, indeed thinks and practices on the basis of a belief system or credo. (p. 169)

In this series of essays, we invite psychoanalysts from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches to clinical practice to write their own “credo.” We ask them to formulate some central aspects of their current ways of thinking about practice, their therapeutic ideals, the values and “intentions,” as Stephen Mitchell (1997) put it, that guide their practice of psychoanalysis. We invite these authors to consider their approach not only from the position of the theoretical influences that have shaped their thinking but also from within their own personal individual experiences of functioning in the clinical therapeutic domain. Writing from within their analytic experience