Editorial

Dear Readers,

The Editorial in Vol. 111(1), March, dedicated to Endings, announced that June will search for Beginnings.

What does it mean to begin, with(in) psychoanalysis? The question engenders anticipation just as it prompts us to look back:

‘Now we have finally begun’, the analyst thinks, not necessarily at the first session, but maybe three months down the line or even longer as the case may be. Before that moment, the work has not constituted that kind of opening … we must wait. We do not know when this time will arrive. In fact, most often we only know it after it has passed, as in the now we have which marks the point in passing. (Webster, 2011, p. 2)

With the beginning already passed, there might be a quiet sigh: What else could have been? One remains uncertain whether psychoanalysis has one beginning, or many.

Is there such a thing as a new beginning?

An unlikely respondent is the thinker with no patient's patience, Hannah Arendt. Her concept natality is at the center of the section Examined Lives. Ali Shames-Dawson writes about the “developmental grief,” while reminding of Arendt's claim: new beginnings are possible because ours is the vita activa. We can act in ways that do not substitute a radical wish by making peace with what is readily available.

This issue opens with two articles focused on the early history of The Psychoanalytic Review. Taking the journal as an object of inquiry, Anaís Jimenez Martinez and Indy Davis explore “Fantasies and Fabrications of Racial Difference” as recorded on two intersecting sites: The Review in the period between 1913 and 1917, and Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, where William Alanson White, MD, served as the Superintendent between 1903 and 1937. Visiting contributions on the topic of psychoanalysis, comparative psychiatry, and race, they chart an uncanny history of segregative

reason. Nothing more treacherous than measuring subjectivity by a “weak” science (psychoanalysis) while forging alliances with the