Editor’s Note

I assume the editorship of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly at a time when the vision of the analyst, traditionally focused upon psychic reality, must find a relation with massive, unpredictable changes in the external world. How can we contend with such changes individually and as a field? How do we locate ourselves within the flow of events? From what vantage points can we perceive the events we inhabit? How can we communicate these to others?

Freud, of course, encountered the same problem, developing his invention in a century shattered by two world wars. And although this finds little place in its early papers, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly itself was launched in 1932, during the Great Depression. How then can we begin in the middle of an ever-changing world?

It is useful, I think, to start by considering Freud’s advice to the patient, from his 1913 paper, “On beginning the treatment”: “Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside” (p. 134). Freud’s railway image is so familiar to us that it has lost its power, but if we return to it and re-open it to interrogation, we can see that it contains many of the questions that we encounter at the present moment.

Freud appeals to the patient as the observer of the patient’s own free associations, derivatives of his psychic reality. The analyst does not have direct access to these; he learns primarily what the patient reports. If we construct a picture in our minds of Freud’s image, we see the patient beside the window, looking out at the changing scene, and the analyst beside or behind him, listening, but not seeing out. This image, which views the scene from the perspective of the analyst, captures something essential about the analytic process: what the analyst learns is filtered through the patient’s subjectivity. The analyst constructs her version of the patient and his world from what the patient tells her and what he does not, what the patient sees and what he does not see. Drawing upon Freud’s 1912 “Recommendations to physicians practicing psycho-analysis,” we would add that the concept of the analyst’s “evenly-suspended attention” (p. 110) allows for a filtering through the analyst’s subjectivity as well. But it is the patient’s associations and actions that ideally stir the analyst’s free-floating thoughts.

If we step away from the analyst’s perspective though, and look at analyst and patient together, we become aware that the analyst must also be on the moving train. In an indirect way, the image shows the analyst to be blinded to this motion; there is no second set of windows on the opposite side of the carriage through which the analyst gazes. Is awareness of this second perspective necessary for the analyst? Perhaps at quiet times it is not, and certainly, in the early days of analysis, it was of paramount importance for analysis as a field to demonstrate the activity of the patient’s unconscious. Freud himself brought to the image of the railway carriage and the windows a host of his own associations. As is well known, he suffered from a railway phobia, which he connected to his early grief at the train journey taking him away from Freiberg, his earliest home (Anzieu 1986). This was also the journey on which Freud shared a compartment with his mother and saw her naked, forever linking train journeys to forbidden oedipal desires (Cohler 2015). In 1913, Freud was midway through the analysis of Sergei Pankejeff, “The Wolf-Man”; Pankejeff’s dream, of looking out through a window at a tree with wolves, served as the fulcrum of Freud’s model of the importance of the child’s witnessing of the primal scene.

In the present moment, I would argue, we analysts are particularly made aware that we are on the same moving train as our patients, caught up in a pandemic to which we too are vulnerable and, as they are, often dislocated from our homes. Like our patients, we must situate ourselves and adjust to unexpected circumstances in a period of rapid social change. The usual analytic frame has been disrupted on both sides as we have left our offices to treat patients remotely. So, we must ask ourselves what it is about the frame—the railway car of the process—that is disturbed in these circumstances and what is preserved. As a quarterly journal and as a community of analysts who write about analysis, how we can discern and preserve the most important elements of analysis in our writing?

In addition to these existential changes, 2021 brings more ordinary, but nevertheless important changes at The Quarterly. The review process has been restructured with the addition of four associate editors: Daria Colombo, Steven Goldberg, Wendy Katz, and Jane Tillman. Rodrigo Barahona will succeed Daria Colombo as Book Review Editor. Hannah Zeavin is stepping down as Managing Editor, and Gina Atkinson will be returning to resume this, her former role.

We are also welcoming new members to the editorial board. Three new members will be joining us from abroad: Sara Collins from the U.K., Marie Lenormand from France, and Sebastian Leikert from Germany. Seven North American analysts will be joining the editorial board as full members: Sydney Anderson, Seth Aronson, Sharone Bergner, Jennifer Stevens, Mark Stoholski, Hannah Wallerstein, and Nancy Winters. And we have inaugurated a new position, Editorial Associate, to introduce young analysts to the journal and our review process. Two new analysts will be joining us in this role: Alistair McKnight and Nirav Soni.

The end of 2020 also marks the departure of a number of editorial board members, including some who have been with the journal for many years. These are: Sarah Ackerman, Salman Akhtar, Paula Bernstein, Jose Carlos Calich, Antoine Corel, Lawrence Friedman, Lee Grossman, Charles M.T. Hanly, Gil A. Katz, Jane Kite, Peter Loewenberg, Eric R. Marcus, Patrick Miller, Gail S. Reed, Ellen Rees, Bruce Reis, Dominique Scarfone, Mitchell D. Wilson, and Lynne Zeavin. It is with great sadness that we report there has been one death on the editorial board: Emmett Wilson who made an invaluable contribution to The Quarterly. And finally, we bid farewell to Jay Greenberg, under whose leadership the journal has thrived over the past decade. He will be greatly missed.