This is the last issue of TAP that will appear under my editorship. I am turning over responsibility for our unique organizational newsletter to a most worthy and creative successor, whose name will be presented to the Council for its approval in San Francisco. TAP has become more than a standard association newsletter. It is more of a news journal covering an enormous range of psychoanalytic activities in the United States, and to some extent the world.
The efforts and expertise of many are necessary to produce a 40-page quarterly. I have so many to thank, and space is, as always, limited. First, my thanks go to the professionals without whose assistance this publication would look distinctly amateurish, and who taught me so much: production editors Francine Krasowska, and now Michael and Helene Wolff, Sherry Hart at Word Management, and Bill Dorsman at Fort Orange Press. I am grateful to the national staff, virtually all of whom have helped with TAP, even though some have said they're happy to work, but won't read it. But particularly, Ellen Fertig and Tina Faison have been critical supports. National editors Jon Meyer and Lynne Moritz were helpful consultants, and presidents Pyles, Fox, and Fischer were all truly supportive. Finally, the editorial board of TAP is a hardworking bunch of unsung heroes, all of whom I thank for a very good time.
My mission in serving as editor of TAP was to produce a publication that enhanced our community's morale, and both reflected and encouraged the astonishing richness of psychoanalysis used as a tool to understand humankind. While fulfilling the additional mission of reporting fairly and accurately on the internal workings of our organization, I hoped to continually turn our gaze outward towards the potential of our field as it interacts with the world at large.
In the past four years, we added regular columns to TAP on technology, politics and public policy, psychoanalytic science, poetry, curricula, and psychoanalysis in popular culture. A graphic redesign gave TAP a more modern and inviting look. I am pleased with the breadth of coverage TAP has provided, reporting on psychoanalysts' activities outside the consulting room—everywhere from Red Cross disaster work to the arts and media to historical forensics and neuroscience. The next editor will, I hope, take on the challenge of improving the quality and depth of the writing in TAP and add more visual variety. Pages of unbroken copy continue to appear, like a dybbuk that won't disappear, and to my mind suggest a continuing lag between psychoanalysts' way of communicating and more modern communication styles.
I want to close my editorial tenure by reporting on an event that gave me immense satisfaction, both personally and professionally. My son Andy, a freshman at the University of Michigan, called one evening from a fraternity party on campus. He was talking with his friend Jenna about Freudian slips, for whatever reason. Jenna asked him if he “believed in them.” Andy said his Mom did, because she was an analyst. Jenna said, “APA?” Andy said “Yeah, APA!. How do you know about them?” Jenna said she had cited an article from TAP on gay rights in a paper she had written as a high school senior. Besides telling us we need to rethink our abbreviation issue, this story hit me with a bolt of pride and pleasure. That's what we want: for TAP and APsaA to be a resource for important and useful ideas about humanity in all its depth and complexity, so available and relevant that a bright high school student will find her way to us and use our information and ideas in a research paper as she learns to think and write about the human condition.
Thanks, everybody.
—Prudy Gourguechon