Psychoanalytic Dialogues has, since its inception, welcomed controversy. Articles were paired with discussions so as to proffer challenges to the relational paradigm and, at the same time, forge a relational “tradition.” By presenting papers in this innovative manner, the journal’s editors oriented our study with a ruthless, spontaneous gesture that challenges us to keep interrogating, deepening and expanding our analytic theories and their clinical and sociocultural relevance among our international community of readers and writers. Thirty years along, this framework inspires us to contextualize our tradition of scholarship in an ever-evolving matrix of texts, clinical discourses and social practices.
Paradoxically, whilst the relational tradition was cohering, our editorial strategy cleared a path for its deconstruction. The editors were keen to affirm the insights of psychoanalysis-past yet launch a tradition of critique that might upend and reframe everything psychoanalysis, regardless of orientation, had taken for granted. If at times it may have seemed that the founders’ texts were off-limits or that discussants were primed to shore up the relational heft of centerpiece articles, the momentum was already in place for controversy and innovation to hold sway. The “journal of relational perspectives” now proudly includes among its contributors, peer reviewers and editorial teammates, colleagues whose convictions punt well beyond the poles that supported relational psychoanalysis’s originary “big tent.”
What Dialogues most hopes to avoid in featuring discussions can be summed up in the language of recent critical race theory as “assimilation.” It is not our ambition to center a master discourse, nor to rehearse and reinvest our own image in the texts we publish. Controversy is a tool to resist ideological conformity. By embedding articles in the context of discussions, the ultimate aim of our editorial practice is to promote a discourse that rues assimilation without erasing our footprint. Just as we lend coherence to ideas and clinical practice by bringing them into print, we seek to push boundaries and create generative transitions within the traditions that vest us with insight. To that end, we invite discussants who, we imagine, will nudge our collective practice ever forward with commentaries that both immerse us in authors’ texts and challenge us collectively to take lessons learned to the next level.
It is important to explain, here, that while original papers are submitted to the journal and are subject to blind peer review, we editors-in-chief pair articles with discussants in a curatorial manner. Our strategies are various. Sometimes, we engage kindred authors who might elaborate a theoretical concept or creatively illustrate its clinical implications and significance. Other times, we wish to highlight some transformational opportunity in a text by inviting a discussant who we imagine will heed that call and meet it with a challenge. We are committed to intersectionality and interdisciplinarity as a means of contextualizing the dialogue that our outreach to discussants is able to spark.
In this issue, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 31:3, our discussants are bold and spry—which honors our authors while challenging them. In turn, our authors offer thoughtful replies to the discussants that illustrate their personal humility as well as their generous investment in the transformational power of dialogue.
A model for this mode of generative conversation can sometimes be found in one author’s text all by itself. This is the case in the Credo we present by Ken Corbett. The dialogic voice that comes to life in Corbett’s writing demonstrates how a landscape of controversy illuminates a field of play.
That the field of play is ever-expandable can be seen in each of this issues’ papers and discussions. Unafraid of controversy, Shelley Nathans retools the Oedipal narrative for use in couples therapy. Jade McGleughlin and Mary Morgan reply with retoolings of their own. Yakov Shapiro and Terry Marks-Tarlow propose a radical rethinking of intuition that amounts to nothing less than a reconfiguration of psychoanalysis. Janine de Peyer responds by elaborating Shapiro and Marks-Tarlow’s ideas and shares her own clinical experiences of portals through liminal space; Daniel Butler queries the very project of proffering “a transcendental wholeness by which all subjects are supposedly bound” (this issue, p. 282). Steven Cooper revisits a foundational paper in relational psychoanalysis, Stephen Mitchell’s account of the “developmental tilt.” Cooper’s cogent challenge troubles Mitchell’s (mis)reading of Winnicott with challenging discussions by Jessica Benjamin, Amy Schwartz Cooney and Sally Swartz.
Controversy is not always easy or pretty. But let’s not be shy! An ever more inclusive and expansive psychoanalysis depends on it.