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The work of producing a peer-reviewed journal involves keeping on top of a whirlwind of moving parts. We recruit submissions, assign reviewers, shepherd writers through the process of revising their articles for publication, and invite discussants to engage dynamically with the authors. Curating issues allows us to stand back and witness the scope and breadth of current writing in psychoanalysis. It’s important to us to represent the range and diversity of voices, emerging and established, within our field. Thumb through the major journals, new format magazines, and newsletters; listen to podcasts and view short format videos, and it will be clear that it is a very demanding task, as one of our readers recently put it, to “hold the center.”
What does it mean exactly, to hold the center? And for whom? We don’t view the task as staking out a “center” or “compromise” position between advocates for seemingly antagonistic positions or journals that tilt toward one psychoanalytic perspective or another. Rather, we understand “holding the center” to be steadying the “big tent” as it stretches, expands, and deepens. Relational psychoanalysis was always a coalition of advocates for not-always compatible positions. Hence Psychoanalytic Dialogues became the “International Journal of Relational Perspectives” and our format featured discussions and replies to emphasize the generative power of controversy and comparative thought.
If Dialogues was originally thought of as a big tent for competing psychoanalytic perspectives, we have witnessed it becoming a big tent for competing interpretations of core concepts as well. Take “splitting” for example. Our effort to hold the center, as it were, involves not only being careful to feature representatives of a variety of theoretical schools on the topic, it also involves stretching the concept itself - to foster the widening scope of psychoanalytic thought while respecting the integrity of old and new ways of configuring this seminal cons