Prologue

Twenty Years Ago when Psychoanalytic Inquiry was launched, one of the hopes of the editors was that the journal would contribute to the reduction in the hiatus between the actual occurrences within an analysis and the psychoanalysts' description of those occurrences. Psychoanalysts had great difficulty in describing what actually occurred in the psychoanalytic situation. A principal reason for this discrepancy was that the models that were available to psychoanalysts that could help in understanding and conceptualizing the complexity of the analytic situation were notably incomplete. Today there has been significant change in how analysts think and communicate about the analytic situation because of the depolarization of theoretical positions, the influence of advances in development, neuroscience, and cognition. The psychoanalyst today has a freedom to integrate many concepts from a variety of psychoanalytic models without doing injustice to his or her clinical theory.

During the past 20 years our understanding of therapeutic action has also been enriched. We are able to conceptualize the process far better. Considerable attention has been devoted to the process of change. Models of development have been used to enhance understanding. The concepts of safety and increased capacities for ownership and mastery in the analytic situation are used frequently in describing therapeutic action. Interaction, subjectivity, and enactment have become part of the lexicon of therapeutic action. Some of the developments in neuroscience have already enriched thinking about therapeutic action.

Unconscious communication in the analytic situation remains an area that requires further consideration if our concepts are to continue to become clinically relevant. We still are confronted with a hiatus in the writing and thinking of the psychoanalytic process because insufficient attention is given to the domain of unconscious activity.