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As the result of many hours of conversation about ethics among publishers, editors, authors, and representatives from search engines whose aggregated links promote the growth of our field, an important policy shift has taken place that concerns clinical writing. For many years, patient confidentiality was safeguarded by a standard of consent. Currently, the gold standard is a set of very specific guidelines for anonymization that each journal adapts to best fit its mission. Patient consent is still permitted and even encouraged, but now not required. In other words, it’s up to the author as to how to approach the task of writing about patients, as long the material is heavily anonymized, including the option of sharing the paper with the patient.
This shift has raised several important and generative questions about what makes psychoanalytic writing clinical? In years past, it was common to hear certain narratives referred to as “clinical” papers, others as “theory papers,” and still others concerning “the social.” We’ve worked to complicate these distinctions in Dialogues because we see no merit in pigeonholing authors and their papers along these lines. Plus, what makes a narrative clinical and what makes it something else is itself a theoretical question that is best answered in the ineffable and emergent space where clinical moments, rendered in the analyst-author’s voice, meet the reader’s read.
As Thomas Ogden (2005) explained: “Analytic writing constitutes a literary genre of its own. It involves the linking of an analytic idea with an analytic experience created in the medium of language. What makes this literary genre so demanding is that experience-‐including analytic experience‐-does not come to us in words. This fact generates a paradox that lies at the core of analytic writing: analytic experience (which cannot be said or written) must be transformed into ‘fiction’ (an imaginative rendering of experience in words) in order to convey to the reader somethin