Epilogue

Winter 2022, I was in a Psychoanalytic Inquiry Editorial Board meeting, listening to my colleagues share compelling ideas for journal issues, several of which were focused on giving voice to particular communities that had been historically marginalized in psychoanalytic theory and culture. It occurred to me that there might be some throughlines in the experience of marginalized psychoanalysts, and perhaps a volume that included voices from a diversity of marginalized experiences—including but not limited to race, class, religion, disability, neurodiversity, sexualities, genders, and others not yet identified—would illuminate whatever throughlines might exist. I invited my friend and colleague, Dr. Christina Emmanuel, to co-edit with me, and she readily agreed. However, shortly thereafter, Christina informed me that she was unable to participate due to health reasons, and within the year she passed away. With Christina’s illness went my motivation to pursue the project.

Until the announcement for the (Re)Centering Psychoanalysis conference appeared in my inbox, with this description:

The majority of diversity-related trainings for mental health practitioners are either explicitly or implicitly geared toward helping majority-identified practitioners expand their capacity to work with minority-identified patients and contexts. There is a clear gap in supporting psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of marginalized identities (LGBTQIA2S+, BIPOC, immigrant, etc) to navigate relationships with those in the majority and experiences associated with discrimination, bias, and micro-aggressions in their clinical work and professional interactions. We want this conference to be one step forward in closing that gap.

With encouragement from co-editor-in-chief Daniel Goldin, I contacted Nicole Nelson and Adrian Sanchez, who conceived of and organized the conference, and invited them to guest edit this volume of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, in an effort to enact the mission of the conferen