Editorial

Dear Readers,

It is an honor to address you as the Interim Editor of The Psychoanalytic Review.

A person who wanted to pursue psychoanalytic training in New York City in the mid-1990s, with no diplomas in medicine, clinical psychology, or clinical social work to their name, met with many closed doors. Founded in 1948 and in the aura of Theodor Reik , the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) was a rare space inviting potential students—I was one of them—then termed “lay.” Not by chance. Reik obtained a doctoral degree in psychology reflecting on the case material of an unusual kind: Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

By not traveling the royal road of medicine and aided by no less than Sigmund Freud's prescription (that medicine does not constitute a privileged access to psychoanalysis), Reik may have suffered in his immediate American present. Yet, his project, a temptation itself—reading novels along with psychoanalytic papers, lending the third ear to those convinced that two were too many, being open to surprise, detecting potentials for the presence of psychoanalysis in spaces beyond the clinic—is here to stay. So is the fact that there are no Reikians easy to find.

I approach my task with an appreciation of the rich and circuitous trajectory of The Psychoanalytic Review, which can be gleaned in the valuable contribution by Alan Barnett (2013), published on the occasion of our first centenary: “The Psychoanalytic Review: 100 Years of History.” Decades after its illustrious start, The Psychoanalytic Review merged in 1958 with the NPAP journal Psychoanalysis. The outcome first appeared as an awkward title-fusion, Psychoanalysis and The Psychoanalytic Review, reassuming the title-connection with the primary ancestor in 1963. Most instrumental in these shifts—of mergers, transfers, and appropriations—was Marie Coleman Nelson . With Leila Lerner, Editor between 1978 and 1988, she was one of only two women Editors through more than