Editorial

A journal is an intellectual signature for a discipline. The journal represents the discipline for itself and for the larger community of scholars and practitioners. Psychoanalytic Psychology has served this function for the members, of Division 39, American Psychological Association, and allied disciplines within psychoanalysis. Division 39 includes a large number of psychologists with interests as divergent as applications of psychoanalysis to developmental and personality study, and the practice of adult and child analysis. The journal represents the interests and accomplishments of this diverse membership within the larger community of psychologists, as well as psychoanalysts from other disciplines. In particular, at a time when the Division has been concerned with the place of psychoanalysis within our discipline, the journal reflects the identity of those who seek to maintain a place for psychoanalysis within psychology.

From the outset, the relationship of psychoanalysis and psychology has been problematic. In part, problems arose from the limited opportunities for clinical psychoanalytic training, particularly outside the New York metropolitan area. In part, controversies regarding the very definition of psychoanalytic practice have led to often debilitating struggles within the community of psychologist psychoanalysts. However, there have also been problems arising from the very nature of the psychoanalytic method itself. Virtually since its inception as a scholarly discipline, psychology has been closely identified with positive science and with prediction of behavior. At least to some extent, as a discipline focused on study of subjectivity, it has been difficult to include this perspective within traditional psychological inquiry.

Although, in part, psychoanalysis shares the scientific world view of psychology, a distinctive characteristic of the psychoanalytic method of study is its focus on the subjective world of the participants in a relationship of so