In This Issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 34-3

It was not so long ago, at least in the United States, that practitioners of the various mental health disciplines who were called upon to work side by side under the same roof were each consigned a signature task and turf. When we four editors of this journal were clocking our hours toward licensure in clinics and hospitals, psychiatrists were, almost always, the team leaders in clinical settings and the primary investigators in research. Social workers attended to systems: families, couples, groups, and to the agencies that provided social services. Psychologists were the data scientists proficient in psychotherapy as well as psychometrics and psychological assessment. Therapy was something we were invited to augment with empirical research, perhaps with some background in philosophy and social science.

This was especially true in psychoanalytic settings. If social workers were at home in the trenches with severely ill patients, and psychiatrists at home in medical roles and offices with windows, psychologists were the number crunchers and projective testers whose home was in the data even when that data was as wildly subjective as the House Tree Person personality assessment. (No wonder, psychologists who turned away from psychoanalysis were among the leaders of a movement for empirically validated treatments). Participation in the hierarchy of mental health disciplines, then as sadly often-still now, meant playing roles in disavowed hierarchies that permeate social and institutional life more generally.

As we four editors were meeting to close this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 34:3, we recalled that the first projective test we were taught to administer consisted of a simple instruction to the patient: draw a house, a tree, and a person. Their psychic structure, personality structure, neuropsychological fitness, and object relational world were evaluated as if the degree to which their capacity to represent a “home,” a “self,” and an “environment” were drawn