Dr. Snyder: How will being Editor of the Journal alter your life as a whole?
Dr. Shapiro: When Sam Ritvo called and said, “Would you like to be considered?” my first response was, “I don't think so.” Then I decided to make a few inquiries. I called some people who ran other journals and asked what alterations they had to make; what the flow of papers was like; how much help they had and how much time they gave to it. I then counted the amount of time I was giving to my other editorial positions.
Dr. Snyder: Which are?
Dr. Shapiro: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for many years and Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. I was Consulting Editor for the Journal of Autism and a communications journal. I also had been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry and an occasional reviewer for the American Journal of Psychiatry and the Archives. I thought if I dropped those I could continue whatever practice I did and also my academic work.
Dr. Snyder: How much time do you devote to practice and academic work?
Dr. Shapiro: I have a full academic commitment at the Cornell University Medical College. I run the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Program there and I maintain four analytic cases and do some consulting work.
Dr. Snyder: When they first came to you then, you said no. When you realized it would be possible, you changed your mind. Why? What was the gain for yourself? What was the gain for psychoanalysis if you became the editor?
Dr. Shapiro: I felt that the Journal was a significant force and a viable insitutition, of a somewhat conservative nature. I thought there could be some changes made with new leadership. I had no critiques of what had gone on before, but I did see the possibility of guiding the Journal in new directions during the next years. I told Dr. Ritvo and the Search Committee that they should look me over at the end of the first five years and that I would look them over also, so that we both can see whether we liked what is happening.
Dr. Snyder: What changes would you like to make? What changes do you think you might want, but not be able to make?
Dr. Shapiro: I look at the Journal as a forum for the exchange of ideas of colleagues and co-professionals. It should be a place where integrative papers can be found, so that psychoanalysis will be cognizant of what's going on outside of psychoanalysis as well as within it. Obviously an important determinant will be what kind of papers come in.
Dr. Snyder: I notice that you specify both colleagues and co-professionals. By the latter, I assume you mean people in other fields who are not necessarily psychoanalysts.
Dr. Shapiro: Yes. I think we ought to be fully aware in our own journal of what is happening in American psychiatry and also applied analysis. One of the things I thought of doing is to invite people in other disciplines who have some interest in the future of psychoanalysis to write integrative papers. Maybe we can introduce a commentary and response section.
Dr. Snyder: The Journal has had articles by people who are not members of
the American, but the idea of actively soliciting articles from people in related fields or people interested in psychoanalysis is, I believe, quite new. Who is an example of the sort of person you have in mind?
Dr. Shapiro: A distinguished scientist such as Eric Kandel (who wrote an integrative article for the American Journal of Psychiatry on neurophysiology in psychiatry) might be solicited. He has been a guest plenary speaker at the recent New York meeting. People who are involved in areas of general psychiatry which are relevant to psychoanalysis might also be solicited. We will have to see. I will need the help of my Board, because I do not want to go ahead without some guidance and support from them. Perhaps in opening analysis to that kind of thing, we can get back to something important that Freud himself did, which was to borrow from the current state of the arts in other areas. He wrote integrative pieces himself.
Dr. Snyder: In your editorial introduction in the Journal you spoke about statistical papers. I cannot remember the last time I saw a number other than a page or a date in the Journal.
Dr. Shapiro: For example, at the midwinter meeting in 1983, Phil Holzman chaired a panel on borderline personality disorders. They had two interesting papers, one by Gunderson and one by Perry, which presented statistical data on the question of whether borderline personality exists as a discreet entity. To answer such a question would require techniques outside of analysis. I believe that the work of scientists like Luborsky, who have done statistical studies of analytic concepts, would also be legitimate work to present. I hope the Board concurs with this.
Dr. Snyder: What other changes would you like to see?
Dr. Shapiro: The other changes are going to have to come from the membership. If the Journal begins to move out from the central position it has represented in the past, I hope to get a broader array of the psychoanalytic community submitting material. They will see that papers are welcome and they will give us a try whereas in the past they might not have.
Dr. Snyder: I have rarely seen brief communications in the Journal, and you mentioned letters to the editor as a way of encouraging people to contribute.
Dr. Shapiro: Harold Blum did try to do that at one point. He felt it didn't work very well. I would have to see how receptive the membership will be to that. If they are, I could see creating a forum section of the Journal. We might solicit papers and see whether they generate a response from the membership. It will be difficult to get started unless people get the idea that their responses are welcome. There are those who think that the Journal is not the proper forum for that; that the Newsletter, for example, provides a better opportunity. But the letters in the Newsletter concern political events.
The Journal as a scholarly organ should have commentaries about ideas. It would be nice to have something like the wonderful letter sections in Lancet or The New England Journal, willing to open ourselves to public discussion. New ideas are not always good ideas. We have had recent intellectual exchanges within segments of psychoanalysis, for example, which have gone off on varying tangents or into areas of interest that some analysts hold dear and others do not. The merit of such discussion, however, is that it brings the ideas to a forum where an exchange can occur. This happens at the meetings of the American. So, why shouldn't the Journal of the American reflect some of this—reflect what is actually going on right now?
Dr. Snyder: I take it you feel that the Journal has not been quite as lively as it might have been.
Dr. Shapiro: Now that I am the Editor, it's hard for me to say that. I see how difficult it is to juggle allegiance to a Board and allegiance to a profession. People may have backed off from sending interesting new things because they felt less welcome at the Journal than at other organs. Whether that was a fact or a fantasy is something that I cannot judge at this point. What I want is for people to feel that the Journal is a place where they will be able to be heard. It will take some time to see how it works out. The Journal is a quarterly and there is a backlog of papers of about one year.
Dr. Snyder: I was about to ask that. What is the lead time?
Dr. Shapiro: From acceptance to publication about a year. In fact, when I came into the editorship on January 1, 1984, issues 1, 2, and 3 were already made up by Dr. Blum. I subsequently made up issue 4 of volume 32 and issues 1 and 2 of 33, all with backlogged papers. So some time will have passed before changes become visible.
Dr. Snyder: What's the current ratio of papers published to papers submitted?
Dr. Shapiro: At this time we get about 135 papers a year, and about a third of those are accepted.
Dr. Snyder: The papers accepted are, of course, both good and appropriate. But, of the papers not accepted, how do they fail?
Dr. Shapiro: My reading of the Board's response up to now is that the rejections are usually because the papers are muddled and poorly written. Some writers do not really keep to a central idea, and some papers are really not new contributions. Some of them are case reports, which may be interesting, but do not make a central new point or add to our knowledge. That is the crucial thing. To be lively and interesting, the ideas do not all have to be exactly new, but certainly they have to have a new twist or be an excellent demonstration of some prior idea.
Dr. Snyder: Are you saying that the Journal has space to publish anything appropriate that comes in?
Dr. Shapiro: Oh, I think the board is open to accepting anything that's good. The central theme for acceptance is, is it an important communication to the profession? Ultimately, what does the analytic
method itself permit us to explicate? What new formulations can be made from the applications of the method?
Dr. Snyder: There are now a really large number of analytic journals. How is the mandate of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association different from that of the others? Why would a paper be more appropriate for our Journal than for one of the others? What would you like the character of the Journal to be?
Dr. Shapiro: The Editor, with the aid of the Board, has fairly free reign over the tone of the Journal and what is accepted. But I think, and this is a personal feeling, that I am also a servant, if you will, of the American Psychoanalytic Association, having been appointed by a Search Committee which was set up by the American. I think there is going to be a certain amount of limit put on what my personal vision may be, by virtue of the fact that the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association stands for American psychoanalysis as a profession.
Dr. Snyder: What part of your personal vision might be limited?
Dr. Shapiro: Well, nothing in fact, because having been appointed I now have five years to do pretty much what I would like. What I do, of course, is always subject to review, as is my Board. We nominate but the Council must approve my editors.
Dr. Snyder: No, I understand that. What I meant was, which of your ideas or the directions you want to take do you feel might elicit opposition?
Dr. Shapiro: I don't know where it would come from. There are always some people who complain, and no one likes to have something they have done turned down. You will have disgruntled authors no matter what.
Dr. Snyder: But that is sort of the nature of the beast—the authors. I am asking if you anticipate that directions you might want to take might be thwarted. I'm pushing you now.
Dr. Shapiro: No, the limiting factor will be what people submit to us. I hope to convince my Board that openness to new ideas or an interesting treatment of an old idea is important for the membership to read. The Board has to see the Journal as a medium of exchange and not as the imprimatur of the Association. Then we will have the really open forum which I think a journal ought to be.
Dr. Snyder: I'll try another tack. If you could invent papers, how would the Journal of the American be different from the Quarterly? How would it differ from Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought or from the Annual?
Dr. Shapiro: It might not be different, Elise, because what generally happens is that the organs that have grown up around the two or three basic journals (that is, the Quarterly, the International, and the Journal of the American) have grown up because they have felt that the American did not provide a forum for them. I was on the early Board of the Journal of Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science and then Contemporary Thought. Some of the people in that group felt that some of their ideas were not acceptable to the Journal, that they were …
Dr. Snyder: Right, that their papers were turned down not because they were muddleheaded, but because they promulgated ideas that were not in the mainstream, let us say, of analytic thought.
Dr. Shapiro: Yet, if I look at Contemporary Thought, as well as other journals that started out with a feeling that they were going to open things up, I don't think that the papers there are so
radical or strange or out of the mainstream of American psychoanalysis that they would not be acceptable to the Journal.
Dr. Snyder: At this point.
Dr. Shapiro: At this point, right.
Dr. Snyder: Okay. So presumably the issue is that you would like the Journal to be more open to whatever is going on, to take papers that otherwise might have gone to more “radical” journals.
Dr. Shapiro: Yes, except that whatever one conceives of as “radical” in those journals is in the end not so terribly radical.
Dr. Snyder: But that's always a question of time. Radical is also new.
Dr. Shapiro: Yesterday's radical is today's conservative.
Dr. Snyder: You've been talking, I think, about a kind of balance between the Journal leading and Journal following. I think, from what you've said, that you would like the Journal to have some role of leadership in analysis. You would want it to be the place where new ideas are introduced.
Dr. Shapiro: That's right. So, in the end, that goal depends on people seeing that it is possible for them to publish their new ideas in the Journal. One thing I think the membership may not even know, is that the Journal of the American has a broad readership. We have over 7,000 subscribers, and that really is to the credit of Harold Blum. If we write something, most of us are narcissistic enough to want it to be read by lots of people.
Dr. Snyder: I think there is another point. The young writer in analysis doesn't seem to want to write at all. How does one encourage the young people to write?
Dr. Shapiro: Well, that is a problem that I feel is unique to analysis. I know of no other science where young people are distinguished from old people by virtue of their age or newness in the field rather than by the quality of what they do. At the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the Journal itself there are prizes, for example, for younger graduates to encourage them to write. I think that's silly and divisive. I would like to create a medium where ideas are merited and not the question of whether you are a new writer or an old writer.
Dr. Snyder: Speaking of ideas, I've found the supplementary issues, organized around a single idea, very interesting.
Dr. Shapiro: Well, we have the mandate to put out special issues periodically. Harold Blum organized the most recent one, which was essentially a tribute to Anna Freud. I certainly want to do supplementary issues, but right now we are due for another index. It's an important function of a journal to keep up its scholarly aspects.
Dr. Snyder: I have one more question — the one everybody gets asked whenever they assume an important position within psychoanalysis. What are your views on the health of psychoanalysis … that famous patient …
Dr. Shapiro: That is a question that has to be divided into at least two areas: first, the viability of psychoanalytic practice in the current scene, and second, the viability of psychoanalytic ideas and scholarship. In many areas of the country recent graduates are trying to get analytic cases; whether the community will support therapeutic analyses with both interest and money is an important question. Regarding psychoanalytic ideas, only insofar as the psychoanalytic method is applied, can we get the data to produce new ideas and to elaborate on them and to see not only what is therapeutic but what interesting theoretical models can come out of it.
On the other hand, there are lots of people who are interested in psychoanalysis who are not analysts. Psychoanalysis seems to be thriving in some of those quarters. In the universities, in areas such as literature and art, Freudian ideas are still rampant. Those people by and large know very little about recent events in psychoanalytic practice. So it's tricky. I think a lot of psychoanalytic writing is sometimes overly scholarly, footnoting everything that's been written in the past eighty years. There is continued firm and appropriate devotion to Freud. Yet on the other hand, we've gone through many phases since Freud's time.
When I was in training, ego psychology and Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein were central. Everybody decried the notion that depth analysis was lost. In fact, Glover, as I recall, wanted to form a society for the preservation of the id. Recently there has been the rise of self-psychology. A lot of these areas may be a series of innovations, but I think many analysts treat them—I'll paraphrase a quote from Whitehead—that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Maybe all of these are a series of footnotes to Freud, but it would be sad if this were a field which was going to be totally dependent on ideas which were formulated at the turn of the century. I think we have to move ahead, modify and update some of the material. I think that would make it exciting.
Dr. Snyder: That will obviously be the function of the Journal under your editorship.
Dr. Shapiro: While a journal can lead in many ways it is very much a servant of the vitality of the field itself. So, your question about the vitality of the field is very pertinent, because if it is vital it will be reflected in the Journal. That is what I want.
Dr. Snyder: Right. Thank you very much.
Dr. Shapiro: Thank you.