Editors often have lofty ambitions when it comes to steering a journal, but some of the most important decisions we make are very granular.
We have written previously about how seriously we take our editorial responsibility to cultivate and strengthen author’s and discussant’s idiosyncratic voices, particularly when we find people in a heated disagreement and/or when vulnerability shows itself on the page. Authors risk exposure on many levels: personal, political, and creative. Our public-facing job is to engineer a balanced perspective among the diverse dialogues that we present to foster resonance with the psychoanalytic “tradition” while welcoming innovation and change.
Writing editorials and mission statements about how we do that might seem where we make our mark. But the fundamental tasks of polishing prose and copyediting text – orthographic and grammarian tasks that are obsessive and anonymous, often speak louder than words themselves. Matters of style and word choice can make or break an argument. They influence how and what we read. And, in the worst of circumstances, in societies where partisanship and censorship rule the page, a comma here or an off-color word there can come to determine whom we read.
You’ll see us wrestling with these editorial tasks in the texts of this issue. Before the editors sent their final draft of Psychoanalytic Dialogues 33-4 to the production team for copy editing and layout, our pages included a variety of foreign accents, culturally specific language, unscrubbed double-meanings, and the inconsistent application of spelling rules for words as common as Black and white.
The issue of how to spell racialized terms comes up in a conversation between Masha Borovikova Armyn, Sue Grand, and Jill Salberg (more on that in a moment). There is no consistency in how authors apply “the rules,” nor are the rules consistent. For instance, The Associated Press does not capitalize “black” or “white” when referring to racial identity or ethnicity unless it is part of a proper noun, e.g., Black History Month. In the current APA style guide, Black and White are both capitalized whereas in 2020, responding to surging racial violence, the New York Times adopted Black and white as preferred usage.
Confusing right? These seemingly small choices have large consequence. We are particularly sensitive to these issues when we edit Snapshots of topical issues by authors who might not otherwise have found a voice in our pages. Struggles for justice in healthcare, climate, psychoanalytic practice, and personal expression demand representation in the author’s vernacular which may or may not conform to our own publisher’s manual of style.
As part of our ongoing effort to present Snapshots of current psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and activism, we invited thirteen authors from around the world to address the global rise in assaults on women’s and trans rights and gender-based violence, and how it has affected or inspired their work as feminists, psychoanalytic clinicians, and human rights activists.
According to the World Health Organization, 35% of women worldwide have experienced gender related violence during their lifetime. Globally, 137 women are killed every day by a family member or intimate partner. Gender related violence and discrimination have devastating consequences for physical and mental wellbeing, disproportionately affecting LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, and indigenous people as well as political dissidents and trans people who live in the shadows of authoritarian regimes.
We are honored to feature voices from around the globe including Afarin Kohan, Gohar Homayounpour, Shaista Shams, Manal Abu Haq, Dana Amir, Maria Paz Ardito and Andrea Rihm, Katie Gentile, Ieasha Ramsay, Rebecca Sivitz Tew, Danielle Novack, Debbie Waxenberg, Limor Kaufman, and Betty Teng: from Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine/Israel, Chile, Northampton, MA, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Los Angeles. We value these newer and venerable psychoanalytic authors in no small part because of the risks they are taking to bring our understanding of trauma to the front lines.
Through what he calls, “unconsciousness-raising,” Nick Malherbe considers how those working within psychoanalytic liberation movements can stretch the political capacities of the consciousness-raising process by recognizing how the unconscious structures emancipatory political organizing. Unconsciousness-raising has the potential to shift the activist subject’s relationship to unconscious identifications in accordance with a democratically conceived political agenda, and to harness the emancipatory potential of desire to advance this agenda. Alexandra Woods considers oppressive hierarchies of privilege within the capitalist order and raises questions about Malherbe’s distinction between “consciousness-raising” and “unconsciousness-raising.” Garth Stevens addresses five issues in relation to Malherbe’s thesis on the implication of the unconscious in the structuring of our political orientations and activities, and the importance of engaging in a process of unconsciousness-raising.
In an article addressing the mutative role of play in child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, Elena Molinari and Violet Pietrantonio describe transformations in play, elaborating on Bion’s notion of “transformations in dreaming” in analytic process. Using clinical vignettes of play therapy, they describe the paradoxical interplay of words, action, emotional expression and aesthetic movement in an intersubjective process of change. Hilmar Schmiede-Neuberg’s discussion is a wide-ranging romp through the Bionian landscape, expanding the theoretical relevance of reverie, dreaming, and playing in our work today.
In a qualitative study presented as a stand alone piece, Ronna Haglili elucidates links between trauma and social activism, noting bidirectional motivation and impact. She suggests that individual, collective, and discursive witnessing and constructive enactments can moderate the effects of trauma. Based on her research, she formulates an expanded conceptualization of trauma that interweaves intrapsychic, intersubjective and collective experiences within the realm of social action.
Sue Grand and Jill Salberg are well-known for their extensive writing on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. In the two papers that we paired for the panel, When the Personal Helps Us Write the Political, both authors use autobiography to activate the text as they explore ever more dimensions of whiteness. Personal reactions to political events become each author’s muse, pushing both women to review known territory for inroads into what may not have been previously seen. Hence the uncanny title Grand and Salberg chose for the conversation they had with Masha Borikova Armyn about the stakes involved in exposing personal and political struggles on the written page, Again, the Personal is Political and Psychoanalytic.
Armyn prompts us to add that the editorial political is also. We chose to publish the text of their interview using the preferred style of each author knowing that flouting “the rules” creates inconsistencies and invites controversy. As we learn in the interview, parsing social cues that peek out of deeply entrenched grammars can be quite a challenge. Racism and gender related violence, however, unfold in vivid display. And we will continue to call them out in no uncertain terms.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.