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We assemble this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues 32-4 alert to the backdrop of a horrific war raging in Ukraine that exacerbates an already stark global refugee crises and accentuates a human capacity for unchecked cruelty, violence, racism, xenophobia and nationalism. The Ukraine war unfolds in the context of the ongoing exhaustive impact of COVID-19, a full-scale attack on women’s reproductive rights expressed in the U.S. Supreme court draft decision on Roe vs. Wade, legislative curbs on the freedom to articulate one’s embodiment in gender and to educate children about sexuality, the continued collapse of Truth and, with it, the “social container,” and a climate emergency that is already ravaging our planet and promises a myriad of future environmental catastrophes.
There is an individual and collective sense of helplessness in the face of all this global trauma. People face each day with a heightened sense of risk and uncertain future reward. What is our role as psychoanalysts and as editors, individually and collectively, in this desperately challenging time? In the words of Jeremy Ornstein, whose call to arms is featured in our collection of Snapshots on the climate crisis and psychoanalysis: “How do we spread urgency without magnifying our own fear or cynicism? How do we raise the alarm bells without bursting our eardrums?”
Taken together, the Snapshots, papers, and discussions in this issue address hope and hopelessness. Each author locates their inquiry in an atmosphere of collective concern: How can we maintain hope and sustain connection when all seems lost; how do we remain present and alive in the company of Others whose spirit has been trampled by developmental and racial trauma? How can we accompany our patients, not abandon them in their dread and despair while finding ways of staying affectively alive ourselves? How does the analyst remain robust in therapeutic conversation while also parrying feelings of shame, experiences of exclusion, inevitable e