As always, I would like to thank the editors, board members and reviewers of the journal for their ongoing invaluable work, especially during these challenging times. A positive aspect of the current situation is that we now are able to have greater interregional contact via Zoom meetings. Our IJP Writing Workshop Webinar attracted over 200 people, and we are planning webinars around IJP papers.
It is with great regret to announce that in June this year Lucy LaFarge stood down as North American Regional and Associate Editor. Lucy was a very valued editor and excellent colleague and was with the journal for a decade. I always enjoyed our invigorating discussions on submitted papers and will greatly miss her excellent input. I wish Lucy all the best in her new post. I am very pleased that Bruce Reis, Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, currently the Book Review Editor for North America, has stepped in to act as North American Editor. He will remain in the post until the official appointment of the North American Editor in March 2022 (an appointment that will take place with the help of the IJP College). Bruce is a great addition to the team, and I look forward to working with him over the coming months.
On the matter of reappointments, it is with enormous sadness that I myself will be standing down from the Editor in Chief post in March 2022 as my term of office comes to an end then. I will say more at a future point about the absolute pleasure it has been to work as Editor for the journal, but for the moment I want to bring your attention to the appointment process of the next Editor in Chief. Information about the new appointment can be found here: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/ripa-call-for-editor-in-chief. The deadline for applications for the post is 31 October 2020.
The corona crisis has confronted us with new and challenging experiences as analysts. In the Analyst at Work section of this current edition of the journal, we explore some of the clinical issues that arise from working psychoanalytically during the coronavirus pandemic, confronting us with our assumptions about the setting, the analytic situation, and boundaries. In the rest of this IJP issue, we have an excellent array of submitted papers, including on Sabina Spielrein’s theory of language, materialism in Freud and Walter Benjamin, and understanding psychosis through Laplanche. Our Education Section explores different conceptualisations of the Superego. Here, I would like to remind readers about our Education Section resource on the Taylor & Francis website, where we host a number of papers for Educational purposes on areas such as sexuality, splitting, shame, phantasy, psychosomatics, and more https://www.tandfonline.com/page/ijp-education-section
I would also like to take the opportunity to remind readers that all accepted papers go online as soon as they are ready and before being allocated to an issue of the IJP, so do make sure to look at the Taylor and Francis IJP site to keep up to date and engage with the most recent work https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ripa20/current. (If you need help with accessing this, go to https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showLogin). In addition, we hope you will have downloaded our IJP App, which makes it extremely easy to read the IJP on your phone and iPad, so if not, give it a go! https://www.tandfonline.com/pb-assets/tandf/Migrated/IJP-App-instructions.pdf (or search Int Journal of Psychoanalysis on the App store).
To help the analytic community share insights and develop deeper understandings of working during Covid-19, we are very pleased to have established an IJP Prize for the best paper on the subject of any aspect of working psychoanalytically during the coronavirus crisis, which can include taking a wider perspective to include other situations of social crisis http://www.theijp.org/workshops/. In future issues of the IJP we will continue to look at ideas about working remotely, and at other issues of pressing current interest; papers on psychoanalysis and racism are in the pipeline.
Until then, keep well, and enjoy issue 4.