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It is March 2, 2022, as we gather in our zoom boxes for our Editors meeting to finalize our work on Issue 3 and share our thoughts as we compose In This Issue. Always there is a strange lag time as our words will be read in May, what can feel like a lifetime from this dire moment in our world’s history. We are shaken as individuals, analysts, and as an international analytic community by the devastation and human rights catastrophe in Ukraine. At our most frightened, it can seem that civilization is falling to bits in a kind of Bionian nightmare of beta bombardment. Our hearts and minds are with the people of Ukraine at this terrible moment, just as we are ever mindful of people the world over, fighting for survival in unimaginably brutal political conflicts.
Although difficult to extricate ourselves from the sights and sounds that envelop us, we turn to our meeting and to the question of what psychoanalysis has to offer the world in this moment As we reflect on our task as editors of this journal, we arrive at an affirmation of the value and power of community and of psychoanalytic activism, which we have probed in many papers and panels, as well as the transformative potential of human connection, healing and repair, which we explore in this issue through the clinical encounter.
In our effort to capture our thoughts, we alight on the idea of psychoanalysis as a continual process of becoming. We see the world, our field and our lives in continual flux, holding ongoing challenge and complexity. We play with Ogden’s recent work on the ontological versus epistemological. Building on Bion and Winnicott, Ogden has observed a contemporary turn in psychoanalysis from a focus on uncovering and knowing to being and becoming. This shift and its implications were thoughtfully elaborated by Steven Cooper in these pages (, Issue 3) and has become the focus of converging psychoanalytic inquiry in recent years. We believe that the commitment to uncertainty, to innovation and comple