In This Issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 34-4

Celebrating her election as the first presidenta of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters: “For the first time in the 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico. And as I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters, and our granddaughters.” In a country where women were only counted among voters first in 1953, Sheinbaum’s election counts big.

What does it mean to arrive and to not arrive alone? Although we don’t tend to phrase them this way, these are central questions in psychoanalysis. Add then, what does it mean to count? How to we come to count and to be counted among others? What are the obstacles, the challenges, the risks, and the rewards of belonging, individuating, changing things, and changing one(s) ideas, habits, circumstances, and goals? What awaits(ed) us when we arrive?

In this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 34:4, we present three panels where the questions of arriving at a new place in emotional, material, political, and social life entail grappling with what counts. That inquiry requires taking stock of who and what gets counted. What changed over time to make the uncounted merit account? What went missing or might never be counted or might never have even been taken into account: We tend to call the never-counted that which gets “dissociated” or “split-off,” but ought not we also chart how it comes about that our lens on what is thought dissociated or split-off shifts when we begin to count more? Take Sheinbaum’s election, for example. To count as Mexico’s first presidenta and not be simply a skillful female politician, it was important for Sheinbaum “to arrive not alone” among many who were not, are not, and would never have been counted except in statistics about gender violence. This subtle manner of taking account of how one arrives at a current position and how our patients and our communit