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Psychoanalytic Dialogues has, since its inception, welcomed controversy. Articles were paired with discussions so as to proffer challenges to the relational paradigm and, at the same time, forge a relational “tradition.” By presenting papers in this innovative manner, the journal’s editors oriented our study with a ruthless, spontaneous gesture that challenges us to keep interrogating, deepening and expanding our analytic theories and their clinical and sociocultural relevance among our international community of readers and writers. Thirty years along, this framework inspires us to contextualize our tradition of scholarship in an ever-evolving matrix of texts, clinical discourses and social practices.
Paradoxically, whilst the relational tradition was cohering, our editorial strategy cleared a path for its deconstruction. The editors were keen to affirm the insights of psychoanalysis-past yet launch a tradition of critique that might upend and reframe everything psychoanalysis, regardless of orientation, had taken for granted. If at times it may have seemed that the founders’ texts were off-limits or that discussants were primed to shore up the relational heft of centerpiece articles, the momentum was already in place for controversy and innovation to hold sway. The “journal of relational perspectives” now proudly includes among its contributors, peer reviewers and editorial teammates, colleagues whose convictions punt well beyond the poles that supported relational psychoanalysis’s originary “big tent.”
What Dialogues most hopes to avoid in featuring discussions can be summed up in the language of recent critical race theory as “assimilation.” It is not our ambition to center a master discourse, nor to rehearse and reinvest our own image in the texts we publish. Controversy is a tool to resist ideological conformity. By embedding articles in the context of discussions, the ultimate aim of our editorial practice is to promote a discourse that rues assimilation withou