Editorial

Andrew Leggett has been the Editor of AJP for the past five years, producing during that time five volumes of superb calibre. Under his thoughtful stewardship the journal has gone online, continued to attract international contributors and subscribers, and on occasion sparked the spirited debate that marks an organization comprised of passionate individuals holding diverse convictions. Andrew cares deeply about the journal, but has felt that with a heavy professional workload, and without additional support, the task of carrying the journal forward needed more time and energy than he could commit. Regretfully he has stepped aside, passing on the baton to others who wish to uphold his example of care and scholarship. We owe him an enormous debt of thanks for the time and energy he has given to PPAA and its journal. Over the past few months he has also made space in his formidable work and travel schedule, helping deal with the psychiatric aftermath of the Queensland floods, to provide its new editor with invaluable tutelage on the complexities of producing a journal of this kind. For this support I thank him.

Following Andrew’s resignation Sarron Goldman held the editorial reins briefly before health concerns necessitated his relinquishing of the role. Now it is my turn. Supported by the editorial committee, and especially Elisabeth Hanscombe and Suzanne Dean, and by the advice and encouragement of Allan Shafer, I have gathered together those papers previously edited by Andrew, and produced what I hope is a worthy successor to Volume 29. Apologies and thanks are due to those writers who have waited so patiently to see their work in print.

In considering the articles collected in this volume I have been thoughtful about the theme of disappearance and return that is reflected in the sturdiness of the journal itself. There have been nine editors since the first volume in 1982. There have been droughts, gaps in publication, but complete disappearance has always been avoided by the recurrent generosity of our members in editing papers and the replenishing the well of psychoanalytic scholarship. It is for this reason that I have chosen to use my friend and colleague Dr Peter Durey’s remarkable photo of Lake Eyre, a superb evocation of recurrence and regeneration, as the cover of this edition of the journal. Thanks are due to him for allowing me to use this image.

Disappearance and return underpin both Craig Powell’s moving poem, Fort Da, and Paul Schimmel’s poignant work Deus ex Machina, in which the death of Icarus gives rise to the act of poetic creation. These ideas also weave through the three papers. Shahid Najeeb, exploring Bion’s writings about the therapist’s conscious and unconscious ways of knowing, gives us two beautiful clinical examples which revolve around the disconfirmation of his patients’ fears about disappearing, not being held in mind. Yeo Huan adroitly uses the Fort Da game in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle to tease out the implications of the relationship between hospitality and death, whereby the unquestioning acceptance of things being as they are (Da = there), entailed in this reading of the concept of hospitality, is tempered by the constant element of uncertainty and doubt (Fort = gone). The paper Borges and Immortality by Leonardo Rodrigues provides yet another evocative meditation on this theme of mortality and transience, and its links to creativity and human desire.

The books reviewed between these covers traverse a similar terrain of loss and renewal. Valent’s powerful In Two Minds: Tales of a Psychotherapist, reviewed by Doris McIllwain, is a dark book, part memoir, part case study, where the therapist’s own survival of the threat of traumatic annihilation can become a pathway to greater intersubjective resonance with his patient in the service of recovery.

Carol Bolton reviews a less bleak book, The Problem with Psychoanalytic Therapies, in which the challenges to the survival of such approaches posed by the prevailing medical models and the demand for evidence-based treatments are explored, and the value of the psychoanalytic tradition in spite of these difficulties affirmed. Evidence-Based Psychotherapies for Children and Adolescents, reviewed by Lyndall Kleinschmidt, offers less encouragement to the psychoanalytic therapist while nonetheless supporting the perennial value of “talking cures” in a medicalized world. Lastly, reviewing Knowing, not-Knowing and sort-of-Knowing: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Uncertainty, Elisabeth Hanscombe is impressed by the authors’ examination of the way in which dissociative processes operate not merely as a function of trauma, but also as a helpful and necessary experience for all people throughout our lives.

This edition includes three obituaries of members of PPAA whose gift to the profession, as well as to those colleagues who knew and loved them, could be best summed up by the words of Borges, quoted by Leonardo Rodriguez: “the enjoyment of thinking and of friendship”. It is also in this spirit that I commend to you the 30th Edition of the AJP.

Suzanne Hicks
Acting Editor
PO Box 1115, Margaret River
suzanne.hicks@me.com