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Editors often have lofty ambitions when it comes to steering a journal, but some of the most important decisions we make are very granular.
We have written previously about how seriously we take our editorial responsibility to cultivate and strengthen author’s and discussant’s idiosyncratic voices, particularly when we find people in a heated disagreement and/or when vulnerability shows itself on the page. Authors risk exposure on many levels: personal, political, and creative. Our public-facing job is to engineer a balanced perspective among the diverse dialogues that we present to foster resonance with the psychoanalytic “tradition” while welcoming innovation and change.
Writing editorials and mission statements about how we do that might seem where we make our mark. But the fundamental tasks of polishing prose and copyediting text – orthographic and grammarian tasks that are obsessive and anonymous, often speak louder than words themselves. Matters of style and word choice can make or break an argument. They influence how and what we read. And, in the worst of circumstances, in societies where partisanship and censorship rule the page, a comma here or an off-color word there can come to determine whom we read.
You’ll see us wrestling with these editorial tasks in the texts of this issue. Before the editors sent their final draft of Psychoanalytic Dialogues 33-4 to the production team for copy editing and layout, our pages included a variety of foreign accents, culturally specific language, unscrubbed double-meanings, and the inconsistent application of spelling rules for words as common as Black and white.
The issue of how to spell racialized terms comes up in a conversation between Masha Borovikova Armyn, Sue Grand, and Jill Salberg (more on that in a moment). There is no consistency in how authors apply “the rules,” nor are the rules consistent. For instance, The Associated Press does not capitalize “black” or “white” when referring to racial identity or ethnicity