In This Issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 34-3

It was not so long ago, at least in the United States, that practitioners of the various mental health disciplines who were called upon to work side by side under the same roof were each consigned a signature task and turf. When we four editors of this journal were clocking our hours toward licensure in clinics and hospitals, psychiatrists were, almost always, the team leaders in clinical settings and the primary investigators in research. Social workers attended to systems: families, couples, groups, and to the agencies that provided social services. Psychologists were the data scientists proficient in psychotherapy as well as psychometrics and psychological assessment. Therapy was something we were invited to augment with empirical research, perhaps with some background in philosophy and social science.

This was especially true in psychoanalytic settings. If social workers were at home in the trenches with severely ill patients, and psychiatrists at home in medical roles and offices with windows, psychologists were the number crunchers and projective testers whose home was in the data even when that data was as wildly subjective as the House Tree Person personality assessment. (No wonder, psychologists who turned away from psychoanalysis were among the leaders of a movement for empirically validated treatments). Participation in the hierarchy of mental health disciplines, then as sadly often-still now, meant playing roles in disavowed hierarchies that permeate social and institutional life more generally.

As we four editors were meeting to close this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 34:3, we recalled that the first projective test we were taught to administer consisted of a simple instruction to the patient: draw a house, a tree, and a person. Their psychic structure, personality structure, neuropsychological fitness, and object relational world were evaluated as if the degree to which their capacity to represent a “home,” a “self,” and an “environment” were drawn with solidity and cohesiveness devoid of the intersectional, sociocultural surround. Relational Psychoanalysis was one of the cracks in the floorboards of the home in which psychologist-as-projective assessor dwelt. Homes became big tents under which families shared a variety of relations. By the time the IARPP assembles in Merida, Mexico, this June to discuss matters of home and belonging, relational psychoanalysts will have long since decamped from an edifice that is tidy and true. The diversity of our personal and professional backgrounds and practices is as noteworthy and critical to the future of our discipline (and to our journals) as the fundamentals of a normative habitus were to the House Tree Person test of our clinical “training.”

We live in a chaotic, deeply unsettled world, having arrived in psychoanalysis with personal, sociopolitical, and transgenerational baggage. Immigration, transversality, intersectionality, social unrest, climate change, and ever-more unsure footing in the swirl of algorithmic “intelligence” that datafies persons: these unstable features of social and psychic reality prompt hard choices and soft-assemblies (Harris) as we draw upon images of the ever-changing homes we belong(ed) in and hope(d) for.

It’s with all this in mind that we offer you, not a House, a Tree, and a Person, but an exquisite collection of panels and essays with an open floorplan: belonging in its relation to unbelonging; remembering as it shares space with transformation and struggle; melting ice as both metaphor of the unhomely and a diagnostic for a world that is spinning out. This chapter of our journal home is framed with diverse materials and formats, expanding our notion of what constitutes psychoanalytic writing. This issue houses multiple perspectives and backgrounds because we strive to re-assemble our field with a modicum of hope, confident as we are in its foundation, among the keystones of which is the contribution of Adrienne Harris to Relational Psychoanalysis, a contribution that we return to in this issue with an Après Coup of her masterful essay, You Must Remember This, so that we may home in on a shared future.

We open with Eyal Rozmarin’s very personal meditation on being an Israeli who has chosen to emigrate, Belonging and Its Discontents, an essay that he originally wrote before the horrific events that continue to unfold in Israel/Palestine since October 7 2023. During these heartbreaking six months, Rozmarin reworked his paper to comment directly on the “political and moral earthquake” that he and his patients were enduring. In an op-ed essay in The Guardian (Rozmarin, 7 April, 2024), Rozmarin summarized his thoughts on belonging and the role of the psychoanalyst with this pithy reflection: “It became clear to me that something profound was at play: people were measuring the coordinates of my belonging, and they were doing so because theirs were being unsettled. They wanted to know that we were thinking and feeling similarly, that we belonged together. They were afraid to find out we did not, to feel alone in this intimate space that we’ve worked hard to create together, alone and betrayed.” We are grateful to a large panel of very thoughtful discussants who took up Rozmarin’s themes and joined him in the rumble of current events in a way that constructs a psychoanalytic space in-and-from which to comment on home and homelessness: Gohar Homayounpour, Sam Gerson, Noha Sadek, Lynne Segal, and Adriana Cuenca Carrara, Alejandra Plaza Espinosa, and Berta Loret de Mola (writing together as co-chairs of the Merida IARPP conference; we are proud to present their paper in both English and Spanish).

Leigh Lyndon passed her first School Figures skating test at age five. Her autotheoretical essay, The Ice is Melting, recounts three episodes of “looping” that softly assemble in an emergent analytic identity, taking note of that first skate onto a clean sheet of ice, the joys and tyrannies of “closed loops,” a period of spinning out, and a swim that she shares with a stranger in the chilly waters of California’s Tomales Bay. Lyndon is joined by companions who mostly go unnamed while she travels through time and space inviting the reader to travel, no less, to theorize in the space she paces between the writer’s immersion in memory and the reader’s read. Newly Zamboni’d ice confronts an aspiring champion with a slippery blank screen; there are no hash marks left by other skaters to steady her pace. In turn, Lyndon offers a text with no overt theory, no references, and no citations asking the reader to skate slightly off-kilter as they attempt with Lyndon to land a triple axel or jump to an uncertain fate. Bravely and sportingly, wisely and playfully, Gila Ashtor, Adam Blum, Masha Borovikova Armyn, and Maxine Mei-Fung Chung took up the challenge to travel with Lyndon on ice floes and in the space of autotheory.

In our second iteration of our new series, Après Coup, we honor our colleague, Adrienne Harris, by revisiting her iconic paper, You Must Remember This, originally published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2009. Harris proposes that transformation and growth in analysis are inherently nonlinear, that analytic impasse is connected to impasse and vulnerability in the analyst, and that our experiences, collective, dyadic, or solitary are always multiply configured. She suggests that there is mourning and a sense of loss and sadness that weave through change. Après coup, or afterwardness is also an aspect of analytic movement, along with dynamic reconfiguring and retranslating that are inevitable aspects of mourning. We are delighted to feature a diverse group of discussants who converse with and reflect on Harris’ paper movingly, playfully, meaningfully: Cleonie White, Ken Corbett, Shubha Herlekar, Victor Doñas, Donnel Stern, and Giuseppe Civitarese.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).