Editorial Philosophy

Most stories about the founding of schools of psychoanalytic thought—and of the journals that spring from them—involve a strong component of disillusionment with analytic ancestors, a form of oedipal overthrow based upon a sense that what we have been taught as truth is, in fact, flawed and punctured through with self-deceptions. Our teachers grow clay feet; their teachings, once held up as trusted and security-providing guidelines, are now exposed to be myopic, rigid, and one-sided. The same is not untrue of the founding stories of the schools of thought that emotionally, intellectually, and clinically co-habit within N.I.P., the institutional progenitor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives: A Journal of Integration and Innovation. The coming into being of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (N.I.P.) is itself a tale involving the breaking of old analytic vessels, an origins myth not lacking in swashbuckling detail of youthful bravado and vision coming up against, and breaking free of, received analytic doctrine.

As described by Clemens Loew in an essay in this issue of PP, N.I.P.'s founders, recent graduates of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, “became close friends,” coming together in their shared perception of “a common opposition: the orthodoxy and rigidity of [their] own training, which consisted of Freudian and ego psychological principles” (Loew, this issue of PP). Loew writes that the process of conceptualizing N.I.P. began around the year 1969, and that it was intimately interwoven with the cultural and political Zeitgeist of upheaval and urgency in our country at that time. Strongly influenced by the human potential movement, the founding analysts sought the greater “authenticity, immediacy, and significance of subjective experience,” through the exploration of “other diverse modalities,” but by the early ′80s—again in keeping with cultural shifts—their focus on such explorations diminished and energies were redirected toward a “deepening of