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Although we have worked as analysts for many years, we still find that we are filled with distressing uncertainty about what the most healing response might be at crucial moments. Should we speak or remain silent? Should we ask questions or give answers? Should we disclose something of our own experience or allude to something that occurred between us and the patient in the past? Does one theory or another better address this situation?
Invariably we do respond even if we could not say what led us to the response we choose. We imagine that our choice has been guided, to some extent, by what we have learned from our teachers, supervisors and the writings of authors we prize. But from whom did our analytic progenitors gain their insights? In our efforts to trace the lineage of our guides to analytic practice we have come to believe that biblical and origin stories are a largely unrecognized source of therapeutic wisdom.
Even those of us who do not consciously draw on these stories have been influenced by them; they suffuse our worlds. We have learned that there is no known society that does not have an origin story and that these stories were not often created by solitary individuals but rather that they took form from repeated telling and retelling over many generations. The contributors to this issue have been inspired by these powerful stories and have used them in highly creative ways to better understand the psychoanalytic situation.
We open the issue with Daniel Goldin’s consideration of psychoanalytic origin stories. In “How the Socio/Political World Shapes our Psychoanalytic Origin Stories,” Goldin explores how the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Heinz Kohut, and Stephen Mitchell reflect turns of thinking that address serious disruptions in the cultures in which these theorists lived. He contends that a renewed interest in the cultural imprint on consciousness occupies many analysts today.
Next you will find “‘A Wrinkle in