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This is the first of three issues devoted to the memory of Joe Lichtenberg, who founded Psychoanalytic Inquiry almost 50 years ago with Mel Bornstein. Joe had a restless mind – or perhaps “open” is a better word. He roamed across schools of thought, drawing inspiration from self psychology, relational theory, ego psychology and classical psychoanalysis while resisting the pressure to fix his allegiances to any one school, although self psychology was always an origin point and place of return. He also roamed across disciplines, drawing from infant-research, autism research, contemporary developments in cognitive psychology as well as literary fiction, where learning comes about through empathic immersion in the experiences of others (fictional others in this case), much as it does in clinical work. He also made his mark in multiple domains, creating new psychoanalytic theories, a new psychoanalytic journal based on an original concept, a new institute that included the psychotherapies, and new ways for peers to learn and study together. We needed three issues to do justice to Joe’s many contributions to our field.
This first issue, edited by Elizabeth Carr, showcases Joe’s original psychoanalytic theorizing by reproducing four seminal articles, with discussions by clinicians influenced by these contributions.
The second issue, edited by Linda Gunsberg and Sandra Hershberg, is devoted to Joe’s many collaborations, including the founding of this journal and his famous collaborations with Frank Lachmann and Jim Fosshage.
The third issue, edited by Mady Chalk and Arthur Gray, introduces the lineaments of a new theory Joe was working on even weeks before his death – a theory of power. Husserl famously proposed that the founding principle of being was not best expressed in Descartes adage “I think, therefore I am,” but rather in the simple phrase “I can,” a phrase which connects the human project always to situations in the world of lived experience. In his last days, Joe de