From the Editors: Introduction to Private Lives

Psychoanalytic Perspectives is unique in the field of psychoanalysis. In addition to scholarly psychoanalytic articles and dialogue, we also explore the interrelations of psychoanalysis with other fields and disciplines. Religion, politics, how different cultural values affect the analytic pair, and literature are examples of these connected topics. Each of these areas represents an important, if often psychoanalytically unexplored, aspect of the relational matrix in which we live and function professionally. As a further example, in this issue we apply a psychoanalytic lens to a roundtable discussion, exploring, through autobiographical discussion, the traumas experienced by several “hidden children” of the Holocaust. Around our roundtable, these therapists candidly discuss the experiences they suffered during the Nazi Holocaust and the healing of those wounds, both within and outside of their own psychoanalytic treatment. We believe our open and integrative philosophy is responsive not only to the climate at N.I.P. T.I. but also to some of the most promising current trends in psychoanalysis.

Our field has evolved from its origins in positivistic science and a prescribed methodology that demanded objectivity and detachment, to a paradigm that recognizes our inevitable involvement with, and sharing in, our patients’ struggles as fellow human beings. From that perspective, we attend closely each day to our patients’ life stories; we hear about and participate along with them in mundane as well as life-altering events—their personal triumphs and defeats, joys and sorrows, and more. We witness maladaptive efforts but also their adaptive and creative attempts to meet the diverse challenges of being human. The psychoanalytic literature reflects these changes. While once case vignettes were sterile reports designed to illustrate standardized and often depersonalized clinical principles and methods, contemporary clinical vignettes have assumed an eminently more human qualit