Welcome to the fourth issue of 2016. The issue now in your hands addresses three important areas at the very heart of our field of inquiry: ethics, more specifically the potential of maternal ethics; the notion of perversion; and the multifaceted phenomena of transgender.
First, we present to you a panel centering on Miri Rozmarin’s article “Matricide and the Ethical-Political Aspect of Mother-Daughter Relations.” Using the biblical story of Lot’s wife as an anchor, the article examines the potential inherent in witnessing, more specifically the mother’s witnessing, as a form of challenge to the ethical-political order of things, disruption of phallocentrism and patriarchy, toward an alternative, more life-affirming ethics. Rozmarin writes, “I read this story in search of means to convey to my children how I, as a mother, respond to the violent reality in which we live. I look for a way to make Lot’s wife into a collective mother whose gaze exposes the weakness of the principle of forceful retaliation as justified punishment and extracts the justification for violence as part of holy justice” (this issue, p. 272). The article is followed by discussions by Alison Stone and Stephen Frosh and a reply to the commentaries.
A second panel centers on an article by Philippe Van Haute titled “Lacan Meets Freud? Patho-Analytic Reflections on the Status of Perversions in Lacanian Metapsychology.” Van Haute uses “psychoanalysis against psychoanalysis” to assess how these two psychoanalytic trajectories approach and utilize the notion of perversion to understand human sexuality and subjectivity in general. His conclusion: “If psychoanalysis is to remain true to Freud’s most important insights then it will be a Foucauldian enterprise” (this issue, p. 283). The article is followed by a discussion by Kareen Ror Malone and a reply.
Finally, this issue includes the outcome of the 2016 Symonds Prize, an award made possible through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation. The most striking aspect of the submissions this year was the sheer number of articles we received on the theme of transgender. Given the number of articles, their quality, and the importance and breadth of the issues they raise, the panelists decided not to single out one author but instead to award the prize to the topic of “trans” itself. We are delighted, therefore, to announce that four prize-winning articles will be published over the next two issues. Two articles, by Oren Gozlan and S. J. Langer, are in this issue. The other two, by J. R. Latham and Hannah Wallerstein, will follow in the next issue.
Although each article stands in its own right, taken together the articles open up a series of interdisciplinary questions that go right to the heart of the way our journal approaches gender and sexuality: the ongoing and always open question of sexual difference; the arena of voice, authenticity, and psychic reality; the production and governance of identity categories and their mutability; psychic pain and loss and its potentialities; trauma and the recursive effects of epistemic violence on clinical theory and practice; and questions of desire and what it is that we all want.
We hope that you enjoy reading this issue and find yourselves intrigued and provoked.