With a watchful eye on Europe in crisis, Freud contrasted two collective states of mind: unbehangen, uneasiness or discontent, and the Oceanic feeling, a moment of intentense connectedness that Adam Blum describes in his paper in this issue, “the complexity of experience increases until it can no longer be apprehended purely as a succession of meaningful messages, but may be perceptible as an ocean of music, each swell of harmonic tension breaking into a wave of harmonic relief” (p. 26).
During the past year, as editors of a psychoanalytic journal, clinicians, and citizens, we too have had a watchful eye on the crises that background our efforts. It can feel quite a stretch to aim for harmonic convergence, but to our great pleasure, this past year, Dialogues has stretched, and we are grateful to our community of authors and readers, reviewers and discussants, editors and production staff who have helped Dialogues propel psychoanalysis forward. Insofar as we were able to broaden the diversity of contributors and the range of topics we cover, and highlight new formats, while also featuring papers and Credos by our mentors and challenges from first time authors, we hold great hope for a vital psychoanalysis.
Experiments with format led the way. We began Volume 32:1 presenting the edited transcript of a podcast on Reparations – a format likely to feature prominently in the future as a generation facile with technology charts the psychoanalytic airwaves. In 32:4, we took up crucial issues of psychoanalysis and climate justice in our Snapshots. In 32:5, our symposium on psychedelics and psychoanalytic treatment featured three papers that earmark aspects of psychedelic treatment that shore up relational principles. Rather than pairing these papers with discussants in our traditional mode, we had a very personal introduction that located the topic in our journal’s early history and a Coda that outlined essential areas for future research and debate. We end volume 32 surfing with Adam Blum’s poetic meditation on Ocean and discussions by Francisco Gonzalez and Stephen Hartman, who worked with Blum’s format to foster the kind of literary style we increasingly find in submissions from young authors.
Bravery is a characteristic to be found in so many of the original papers and discussions that we presented this year that we cannot name each instance of risk-taking here, nor can we elaborate on the generosity required to sustain heady debate in uncertain times. Suffice it to say that the papers in this issue, 32:6, by Dhwani Shah, with discussions by Shifa Haq and Lara Sheehi and Stephen Anen, with discussions by Dorothy Holmes and Gillian Straker, go out on a limb and, in doing so, alert us to how “the personal is always political” (as Muriel Dimen used to say). These writers take up issues of race and whiteness as the clinical material, not as collateral damage to it. We support this broadening of what counts as “clinical” inquiry and believe attention to the social bolsters the relational project and grows what Mitchell and Aron aptly named the relational “big tent.”
To that end, we are pleased to find psychoanalytic journals not identified with the relational tradition increasingly presenting work by relational authors who honed their craft in our pages. Many have accepted editorial positions in journals that previously shunned “relational” texts. We see this as a great boon to psychoanalysis and to Dialogues: our tent grows bigger when we foster dialogue among relational perspectives and with other journals to ask what a psychanalytic journal should be and who it can be for. We grow together, as Ed Tronick concludes in his essay in this issue that champions meaning-in-the-making rather than as an artifact of frozen time, a perspective both appreciated and challenged in discussions by Jack Foehl and Neil Altman.
You can be sure that Dialogues will continue to innovate and provoke as we have for thirty-three years, wave after wave, generation after generation, always with an ear to history and an eye upon the vast horizon of possibilities that is psychoanalysis.