Editor’s Introduction

This issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality, the fourth and last of 2015, brings to print two events that we thought would be of great interest to our readers. First among them, a rare conversation between a relational psychoanalyst, Adrienne Harris, and a Lacanian psychoanalyst, David Lichtenstein, each prominent in their own circle, about the similarities, differences, and potential meeting points between these two psychoanalytic schools. The conversation took place in the spring of 2012 at the New School in New York City. It was moderated by Chris Christian of the New School in front of an audience that participated in the conversation a great deal. Naturally, it covered a wide psychoanalytic landscape, from the origins and influences of these two movements, to their conceptualization of basic psychoanalytic notions such as the unconscious, the self, trauma, and interpretation, to the role of the psychoanalytic relationship in the work of psychoanalysis. Because of its wide scope, we invited two psychoanalytic scholars to comment on the conversation and develop its subject matter further. Among the discussants, Velleda C. Ceccoli writes with a relational sensibility, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein from a Lacanian point of view. The original conversation between Harris and Lichtenstein, and Ceccoli and Wolff Bernstein’s engagement with it, create a unique prism into a largely neglected psychoanalytic territory left bereft by cultural differences, linguistic barriers, and old aversions. We are glad to be able to offer our readers this foray into a truly fertile territory. And if Gender and Sexuality do not figure as a dominant focus in this multilayered conversation, they are, as always, just underneath the surface. We plan to unearth and address them as a more direct fodder for a relational-Lacanian conversation in the future.

The second event, partly collected and brought to print in this issue, is a conference that took place at the City University of New York Graduate