Our last editorial: Passing the baton

Abstract

With this issue, we conclude our 5 years of co-editing Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. It has been both a great honor and quite a challenge to follow in the footsteps of our predecessors, William Coburn, Doris Brothers and Roger Frie. We have enjoyed our partnership immensely. As a result of our efforts, we hope we have provided our readership with a challenging, creative, and substantive journal. We are most grateful to George Hagman, Marcia Dobson, and John Riker for their willingness to step up to take the helm at this critical juncture in our journal’s trajectory. We wish them success going forward. Our last issue as co-editors offers important contributions taken from the 43 Annual IAPSP International Conference held in Washington DC in October 2022. The conference theme, Finding Ourselves in Uncertain Times: Emergent Processes of Change and Transformation, was centered on the profound changes affecting the world and our lives, personally, professionally, and organizationally, since we last gathered in Vancouver BC in 2019. In the first panel, Psychoanalysis’ Zero-gravity Moment: Disrupting Where We Land, Cherian Verghese, in his introductory remarks, starts by raising crucial questions about these emergent changes. He asks: “Are we ready to make real and meaningful changes that truly transform us all, or might we slip back into the status quo once the heat of the moment is passed?” (p. 480). Lynne Layton borrows from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher and activist, the term “Interregnum” to designate the crisis marked by the dying of the old when the new has yet to be born, a “zero-gravity moment” in which “everything has been thrown up in the air with absolutely no certainty of where things will land” (p. 486). Lara Sheehi follows with a challenge to psychoanalysis to push us beyond our well-meaning responses to diversity, equity, and inclusion. She asserts: “we have yet to commit to disrupting the conditions and constitutive logic that create oppression, i.e., their root. This is alarming when we understand psychoanalytic theory and practice as consisting of tools that are well equipped to address the structural, the root, and the condition” (p. 494). As a united chorus, all three situate us at a tipping point in our search for emergent radical changes and transformations, in the US, and beyond, but most specifically, within psychoanalysis itself; clinically, theoretically, and institutionally. In the second panel, Practicing in a Time of Loss and Threat: Emergent Processes for Growth and Transformation, Heather Macintosh presents a deeply moving and profoundly human story which, in its own way, disrupts the conditions and constitutive logic (Sheehi, p. 494) of clinical practice as we know it. Unfolding during the throes of Covid, Macintosh allows us a glimpse of her personal transformation as a psychoanalyst as her story is woven in with, and around, the story of her patient’s reckoning with the loss and threat brought on by the pandemic. Macintosh’s clinical focus remains riveted on the leading edge and the potential for healing and growth that can emerge even among the darkest moments of worldwide trauma, personal trauma, and loss. Discussions by Donna Orange and Gabriella Mann follow, further elaborating the wisdom, courage, and tenderness of this work. PSYCHOANALYSIS, SELF AND CONTEXT 2023, VOL. 18, NO. 4, 477–478 https://doi.org/10.1080/24720038.2023.2249370