Editor's Introduction

It is a great honor to have been elected Editor of The Psychoanalytic Review (TPR). I hope to maintain the high standards of professional and scholarly excellence that the previous editors have all displayed. A few words about my beliefs and values that will animate my editorship are appropriate here.

As Freud noted, psychoanalysis can be a useful tool for assisting us to comprehend what he called the “riddles of the world in which we live” (Freud, 1927, p. 253), “a key to explanation of human phenomena in general (and not only pathological symptoms)” as Chasseguet-Smirgel emphasized (1985, p. 120).

My intention as editor is to take Freud's advice, to expand and deepen our psychoanalytic understanding of nonclinical domains of human experience (e.g., spirituality/religion), as well as the “usual suspects” of psychoanalysis (e.g., transference/countertransference).

To accomplish the aforementioned goal is not as easy as it sounds because analysts have, for example, different narratives about the self: the self fashioned by its defenses against instincts (Freud), the self formed by its inner objects (Klein), the self shaped by its internalized relationships (Kohut) (Jones, 1991), and the “self as a narcissistic misrecognition, represented through the symbolic order of language” (Lacan) (as described in Elliot, 1994, p. 113). Moreover, depending on which master narrative one is lodged in, the goals of psychoanalytic treatment tend to be conceptualized differently: We have for instance, “the taming of the beast within” through love and reason (Freud), the “mad person within raging about” who becomes transformed through compensatory reparative activities (Klein), “the discovery of the self within” and the development of compensatory self-structures (Kohut), and “to speak what heretofore has been unspeakable,” to reclaim the voice of one's desires (Lacan) (as described in Roth, 1988, p. 327). As Greenberg and Mitchell (1983, p. 404) have pointed out, “Psychoanalytic models r