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It often happens that a known Dialogues contributor will approach one of the editors backchannel and ask if we might be willing to consider a paper by a colleague or student of theirs. There are many versions of this request that begin with an assertion of doubt about our likely interest: e.g., “this is a very fine clinical paper without much theory;” “this paper has huge theoretical importance but no clinical material;” “it’s not about race, intersectionality, or “the social”;” or, “the author isn’t relational.” We’ve learned that our brand identity is as variable as the questions are contradictory. These comments typically come before we have ever seen the paper and, often, before the author has completed it. Perhaps it was a conference talk or a candidate paper. A piece of experimental writing? A scholarly paper but not a classically “relational” one?
We are interested in all of the above and more!
As Joint Editors, we are in continual dialogue, challenging one another with our shared and divergent perspectives. We are struck by these questions and the distinctions, splits, and potentially false binaries that they imply.
Dialogues has been a pluralistic journal of “relational perspectives” for over thirty years. We publish many papers by authors who are not primarily grounded in the relational tradition, and we have had among our editors many individuals who do not identify themselves as “relational” analysts. Surely, winds blow this way and that as academic trends come and go, and psychoanalysis continues to evolve. We are in a crucial and long overdue reckoning in our institutes and journals with the harms of racism, deconstructing and working toward reconstructing more equitable, inclusive anti-racist analytic spaces and analytic conversations. In addition, events in the world deeply affect our sensibilities as psychoanalysts, individually and collectively. What we publish as well as what we look for in any submission is broad and deep. That said, we do not consi