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In recent years, we have had to come to grips with a realization that earlier generations of analysts could more easily ignore: The world invades our consulting rooms. Continually bombarded by news reports from our radios, televisions, computers, and smartphones of calamitous events arising in every part of our shrinking planet, we cannot help but notice the societal context of our patients’ troubles. Nor can we fail to appreciate the futility of trying to tease apart their familial dramas from events occurring on the world stage.
The greater our distance from our mythic, blank-screen, authoritarian analytic predecessors, and the more we have come to view ourselves as flesh-and-blood, fallible, responsive, vulnerable individuals, the more clearly we see that our formative experiences contribute to the unfolding of our analytic relationships, at times as powerfully as those of our patients. Because our experiences, like theirs, were shaped by the larger social/cultural/political realm in which they are embedded, a deeper understanding of ourselves in the world—and the world in ourselves—seems likely to enhance our therapeutic effectiveness.
This issue is dedicated to just this project. It investigates how living in a world scarred by violence, upheaval, and injustice influences the ways in which analysts think and feel and work.
There can be little doubt that grievous circumstances in their homelands profoundly affected the lives and theories of our psychoanalytic pioneers. Freud is no exception. Leaving little room for doubt that anti-Semitism infiltrated many aspects of Freud’s life and thought, Peter Gay (1988), his distinguished biographer, writes: “He abandoned the dubious privilege of belonging, sensing that his isolation would serve him well” (p. 27). The one-person orientation of Freudian drive theory may well reflect the defiant self-sufficiency Freud developed in the face of rejection and contempt (Brothers and Lewis, 2012). Aron and Starr (2013) document the