We are very pleased to present this Special Issue of PSW featuring six scholarly papers originally presented at the 2019 AAPCSW National Conference: Intrigue, Insight, Inquiry: Through Today’s Psychoanalytic Lens. In addition to being thoroughly vetted prior to acceptance at the Conference, each paper was also subject to a separate peer review process by this Journal.
The substantive focus and mission of the 2019 conference was described as follows: In these multilayered and challenging professional times, how can we sustain excellence in clinical theory and practice? Our challenge is in safeguarding core values—individual dignity, respect for diversity, social justice advocacy—as we embrace innovations in psychoanalytic knowledge.
The papers in this issue reflect distinct associations the authors had to the overarching conference theme and demonstrate both breadth and creativity. The wide range of topics includes:
The use of a self psychological lens to examine clothing and fashion as tools for promoting self-cohesion, as well as how the subjective experience of fashion is shaped by the larger societal context;
The clinician’s cultural countertransference in the treatment of an ethnoculturally diverse clinical population;
A reconsideration of the triangular phase of development in light of clinical, anthropological, and scientific evidence that calls into question basic assumptions about gender and the universality of the Oedipal myth;
Personality disorders reexamined through the discovery of the undifferentiated selfobject, a new addition to the framework of selfobject theory;
Complications and dilemmas in psychoanalytic treatments arising from the use of digital communications;
A psychoanalytic examination of the unique potential music possesses for facilitating healing and change and for addressing grief and loss in times of sociopolitical or personal upheaval.
We believe these excellent papers bring to life the 2019 AAPCSW Conference theme, and invite you, the reader, to sample the intrigue, insight, and inquiry that each embodies.
Editor-in-Chief