A Note from the Editors

In September 2010, members of the Psychoanalytic Perspectives editorial board sat down for a roundtable conversation with Daniel Bergner, Muriel Dimen, Luise Eichenbaum, and Janice Lieberman. Conceived, organized, and moderated by former Associate Editor Melissa Feldmann Secrest, what became “The Changing Landscape of Female Desire: The Growing Chasm Between ‘Hotness’ and Sexual Obsolescence in a Digitized, Surgicized, and Pornographized World” seemed to call for a large enough title to contain a large, albeit beginning conversation about an under-addressed topic of concern to psychoanalysts and the culture at large. We begin this issue with Secrest's introduction to the roundtable and related papers, followed by an edited transcript of the afternoon's stimulating discussion. Sally Bjorklund, Susie Orbach, and Orna Gil offer insightful commentaries on the discussion, and Muriel Dimen a thought-provoking reply to the commentaries. Galit Atlas, inspired by the roundtable, was moved to write “Sex and the Kitchen: Thoughts on Culture and Forbidden Desire,” a fascinating exploration of female sexuality in the Israeli, Arab, and Persian worlds, in which she considers personal and clinical experiences of immigration and identity. She also looks at concepts of attraction and repulsion, idealization, and devaluation that circulate in this region of the world and, therefore, interpersonally and intrapsychically.

Following Atlas's paper, we return to Israel for Neil Altman's “Ongoing Trauma, Ongoing Hope,” an inspiring paper based on his presentation at the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy conference in Tel Aviv in which he explores the notion that in some cases trauma is ongoing and therefore cannot be sequestered in the past. Although this work has broader implications, it is borne of personal exploration and

in response to deep concerns about conflicts in this and other troubled regions of the world.

In 2013,