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Paper, discussions, and replies: each has its own cast of characters. Among the theorists, clinicians, researchers, patients, family members, and friends whose ideas and narratives fill our pages, there is often tremendous diversity of life experience and points of view. Readers tend to consider one paper at a time, encountering the fullness in a text as it is voiced by the actors in each scene. We pay attention to individuals’ multiplicity which necessitates navigating difference as well as areas of identification and resonance. But if we frame the journal issue as a whole to be a symphony of subjectivities, new challenges arise as broad areas of resonance and friction come forward.
In any given issue, complexity emerges from a range of theoretical positions and clinical styles, stories that chart developmental hurdles and interpersonal sorrows, and an array of material challenges. There are astonishing moments of transformation and growth. Memories may be recounted from a distant perch or drenched in affect. Some vignettes bolster an author’s perspective; others frame an interaction from multiple points of view. Reflections upon these encounters depict rival psychoanalytic sensibilities. When grouped all together, this cacophony of ideas, reveries, and life experiences comprises the dramatis personae of psychoanalysis.
The more lives we open our pages to, the more differences we feature. The greater the cast of characters, the more generative the controversies that animate our Psychoanalytic Dialogues. We welcome the breadth and depth of the ensemble of speakers, authors and interlocutors, analysts, and patients.
We are aware that in assembling a diversity of perspectives and subject positions, we court controversy and collisions. With polyphony comes vulnerability. Our task is to hold in mind that the patients who are described, the theorists who are contested, the authors who offer their ideas for discussion and debate are real people whose moment in the spotlight