Editorial

Dear Readers,

At the end of my first year as the Interim Editor of The Psychoanalytic Review, I am thrilled to be able to announce contributions that comprise the December issue. Its Focus, Revisioning, is most directly inspired by the Spring 2024 release of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The original translation of James Strachey, revised, supplemented, and edited by Dr. Mark Solms, was published by joint efforts of the Institute of Psychoanalysis London and Rowman & Littlefield. The 24 volumes present both the voice of the old and the taste of the new, and a mode of wrestling with the lastingly provocative tradition. What for Freud (1936) once “interfered with our enjoyment of Athens […] a feeling of filial piety” (p. 248), may still be with us; we are also in a distinctly different place.

Conversing with colleagues (Gary Ahlskog, Fred Busch, Carl Jacobs, Susan Kassouf, Otto Kernberg, Kerstin Pahl and Eran Rolnik), Mark Solms responds with eloquent generosity to the questions and comments that reflect their engagements with the work of Sigmund Freud, thoughts about the status of research on psychoanalytic concepts, the role of a translator as a person living not only in and through language but in the always complex landscape of reception, all the way to the shift between the Standard of the Holocene and the Revised of the Anthropocene—eras of life and of extinction in which the edition(s) were read and are to be read today. Solms supplies a brief but clear history of the project, with many fine-grained iterations as the conversation progresses: about how Things came to be; about Freud's involvement in—even an embrace of—his own ‘anglicization’; about editorial freedoms, anxieties and constraints.

As the Standard Edition represents not only a library but also a formative substance of the psychoanalytic becoming, it should come as no surprise that the attachment to it (rather than a break away from it) runs through t