Editorial

Excerpt

Jonathan Lear, in his study of the thought of Sigmund Freud (Lear 2005), has observed that the psychoanalytic enterprise, in whatever mutated form it may take since Freud created psychoanalysis, finds itself dealing clinically with a kind of master or archetypal narrative that each patient who comes for treatment brings along in a nearly infinite variety of forms. That invariant narrative, though varied in expression, the analysand brings to the encounter with the analyst, Lear formulates thusly: “In my attempt to figure out how to live”, the analysand says to the analyst, “something is going wrong” (p. 10). Each individual analysis is shaped by this narrative in that it consists of the prolonged search for what is going wrong and why and what, if anything, the analysand can do to make it right. …