The work of producing a peer-reviewed journal involves keeping on top of a whirlwind of moving parts. We recruit submissions, assign reviewers, shepherd writers through the process of revising their articles for publication, and invite discussants to engage dynamically with the authors. Curating issues allows us to stand back and witness the scope and breadth of current writing in psychoanalysis. It’s important to us to represent the range and diversity of voices, emerging and established, within our field. Thumb through the major journals, new format magazines, and newsletters; listen to podcasts and view short format videos, and it will be clear that it is a very demanding task, as one of our readers recently put it, to “hold the center.”
What does it mean exactly, to hold the center? And for whom? We don’t view the task as staking out a “center” or “compromise” position between advocates for seemingly antagonistic positions or journals that tilt toward one psychoanalytic perspective or another. Rather, we understand “holding the center” to be steadying the “big tent” as it stretches, expands, and deepens. Relational psychoanalysis was always a coalition of advocates for not-always compatible positions. Hence Psychoanalytic Dialogues became the “International Journal of Relational Perspectives” and our format featured discussions and replies to emphasize the generative power of controversy and comparative thought.
If Dialogues was originally thought of as a big tent for competing psychoanalytic perspectives, we have witnessed it becoming a big tent for competing interpretations of core concepts as well. Take “splitting” for example. Our effort to hold the center, as it were, involves not only being careful to feature representatives of a variety of theoretical schools on the topic, it also involves stretching the concept itself – to foster the widening scope of psychoanalytic thought while respecting the integrity of old and new ways of configuring this seminal construct.
Then we have to factor in the chaotic world in which we live and the increasingly diverse profession that our journal represents. We cannot, nor would we wish to “center” anyone’s experience in some normative way. What we do hope to do in “holding the center” is feature the many voices that combine to stretch us beyond complacency on one hand and demagoguery on the other. To that end, In This Issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 33-2, we present a broad array of panels beginning with a Snapshots feature on Splitting. We invited a big tent of psychoanalytic thinkers to reflect on their use of Melanie Klein’s generative concept clinically, personally, and as a means of understanding the searing ruptures that are erupting in the world around us and in our professional communities.
We also present a panel that stretches the imagination with papers by Kathleen Del Mar Miller and Katie Gentile, discussed by Patricia Ticineto Clough who explains that both essays ask psychoanalysts to travel amidst the more-than-human in psychoanalytic theory and practice beyond what we generally think of as “the psychic” or “the social.” Miller’s clinical story, Caring for Cryptids: Welcoming the More-than-Human into Psychoanalytic Treatment, dives deep into digital space to portray surprising dimensions of aliveness among cyberobjects. In Gentile’s Destroying the “Human” for the Survival of the World: A Proposal for a Temporally Dense Psychoanalytic Subject, cats have plenty to say about the most profound states of being and the most “anthropological” psychoanalytic situations, as do indigenous theorists who are not often read by psychoanalysts, stretching us to see oceans and hear polysomatic time. Clough proposes a new way to organize psychoanalytic working groups that she names, inspired by her engagement with Miller and Gentile and by Fred Moten’s evocative phrase, Psychoanalysis as a “Studio Practice”: a group practice or a practicing group “of improvisational study,” offering “a refuge of unfinishedness” that can be applied to both theoretical and clinical work.
Next, Lucas Iwer-Docter and Stefan Kristensen offer the paper, Françoise Dolto Between Relational Thinking and Freudian Metapsychology. Dolto, a central figure in French psychoanalysis who is little known in the United States, bridges key concepts grounded in classical Freudian drive theory with an intersubjective sensibility that has a distinctively contemporary tone. These authors see in Dolto’s emphasis on intercorporeal concepts, a view that compliments and augments relational thinking by bringing the embodied dynamics of desire into the theoretical and clinical frame. Rachel Kabasakalian-McKay and Jeanne Wolff Bernstein take up aspects of the tensioned complementarity between Dolto and relational thinking that gives Iwer-Docter and Kristensen an opportunity to expand upon the central role of the intercorporeal unconscious as a key unifying theme.
As a final contribution to our conceptual tent-stretching, in their essay on Victor Erice’s film The Spirit of the Beehive, Julie Gerhardt and Dan Slobin consider how Erice’s work relates to issues core to the contemporary psychoanalytic conversation on the impact of socio-political trauma on the psyche. The authors suggest that Erice’s portrayal of village life in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War is resonant with current construals of the intergenerational transmission of trauma and consonant with the expansion of the psychoanalytic paradigm to elucidate the way socio-historic events impact unconscious processes. Gerhardt and Slobin demonstrate how the plight of individual characters within the film can be seen as allegorical representations of Spain’s surrender to fascist dogma, how Erice transforms viewer into witness, and the film into a prescient warning against the ever-present threat of totalitarianism.
And so we stretch.