Introduction

The editors of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and members of N.I.P. T.I.'s Diversity Committee are delighted to be collaborating on a published project, which will focus on diversity. N.I.P. T.I. has committed itself as an institute to work toward creating and nurturing an increasingly diverse and inclusive environment for candidates, faculty, supervisors, and training analysts. The Board of Directors strongly believes that such an effort will result in the mutual enrichment of all those concerned.

The Diversity Committee has given intensive consideration to ways in which the Institute might promote deeper thinking and exchange toward this end, as the process of embracing diversity obviously requires far more than merely bringing in “token representation” of faces and bodies. Rather, it involves all of us working within ourselves and with each other to engage with the matter of what a more diverse environment actually means practically, ideologically, and experientially. This journal project is a vital venue for opening up some of these thoughts and questions more broadly within the Institute as well as across the psychoanalytic community, as this process is one that extends well beyond N.I.P. T.I. We envision engaging this topic in an open ended way and plan to incorporate essays, scholarly papers, and transcribed dyadic and group dialogues about difference and diversity throughout several Journal issues.

From the earliest days of our clinical education and continuing through graduation from formal analytic training we are taught to ask ourselves and our patients the fundamental question: Why Now? Why is it that you have decided to seek treatment, now? Why has the patient developed these symptoms, now? This question of timing is an essential one. It seeks to address the question of what has occurred in the developmental process that requires attention for growth to continue.