You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
With this issue, Psychoanalytic Inquiry begins its second year of publication. Here and in next issue we are exploring the concept of aggression. We think a subject of such vexing complexity requires the space we are according it. In this issue our emphasis is interdisciplinary. We have distilled the wisdom accumulated by the Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Aggression held at successive meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association under the Chairmanships of Leo Stone, Eli Marcovitz, and Joseph Slap. To this group of dedicated psychoanalysts, political scientists, historians, child researchers, geneticists, and other scientists we are indeed indebted. We have added to articles contributed by participants in the Colloquium papers by other experts. We believe we are thereby providing a broad survey of the problems surrounding the subject of aggression—a classification of its phenomenology, suggestions with regard to its biological and sociological origins, its relation to violence, totalitarianism, narcissism, power and aging—as well as its place in psychoanalytic theory.
Our focus will be more concentrated in our next issue, where we use as our starting point the wonderfully organized psychoanalytically based book by Henri Parens, a highly respected direct observer and researcher in infant behavior, to stimulate essays in agreement or disagreement with his findings and conclusions. We believe the contents of each of these two issues on aggression will complement the other.
The third and fourth issues of this volume of Psychoanalytic Inquiry will be dealing with Adolescent Drug and Alcohol Abuse and with Termination, in line with our aim of balancing the clinical with the theoretical and of adhering to subjects of topical interest and importance.