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Assembling to introduce this last Issue of 2023, we found ourselves oddly adrift. Then, as is so often the case in the psychoanalytic and editorial process, as we sat with the panels that comprise this issue, ideas and associations emerged unbidden and began to take form. As we close out Volume 33, our 4th year as Joint Editors, we see that we have, in many ways, returned to the place where we began and know it again as if for the first time. In This Issue we present three panels that are deeply rooted in the relational tradition which locates the transformational nexus in the therapeutic encounter or meeting of minds. At the same time, each of these panels are innovative and new as the authors grapple with surprising content, forms, and foci, contributing to the ongoing evolution and originality of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
Whether reaching the “dark side” through psychedelics and prayer, contending with the “Big Other” in surrender or subjugation, or struggling to come into being in the interpellative matrix of the maternal, each of these panels map singular, creatively forged, complicated relational journeys. These panels converse within the ever-expanding tent of contemporary thought. In this arena, we travel back and forth in time, wrestling with the Sisyphean task of being the good enough mother, excavating the eternal need for a loving other, and playing at the edge of darkness with novel techniques, substances, and challenges.
In, The Bad Seed: Mystical Experience and Time Travel in the Treatment of Psychopathy, Noelle Burton recounts a very personal quest to work with a man who, by his own logic, need not care about the needs and feelings of others - nor legal and ethical norms which he flouts with a self-satisfied grin. Burton engages the psychiatric literature on psychopathy, refining the diagnosis through the lens of recent research on attachment, neuroscience, and psychedelics in search of a viable relational psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of a