Editors Lair

Abstract

This is the first issue of Free Associations under the joint editorship of journal founder Robert Young and Kurt Jacobsen.  Caroline Bainbridge has stepped down from the editorship after seven years and leaves with the founder’s heartfelt thanks. Caroline and her colleague Candida Yates join our editorial board along with half a dozen distinguished new members.            In alphabetical order, the new board members are Lisa Appignanesi, Freud scholar and novelist;  Peter Barham, historian and philosopher of psychiatry; Stephen Eric Bronner, professor of political science, comparative literature and German Studies at Rutgers University; Ian Christie, professor in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck; Eli Zaretsky, psychoanalytic historian at the New School for Social Research; and Sylvia Zwettler-Otte, training analyst and former president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (200-2004). One can hardly do better for guiding lights, except of course for all the other esteemed board members they join.            Free Associations started in 1984 as an offshoot of the Radical Science Journal.  There were 56 numbers in the printed format. It changed to an e-journal in 2011 and has continued in that format.  With the editorial change, Free Associations, depending on the charitableness of one’s view, enters either a new era or a restoration, in that we reemphasize the original animating concerns of the journal. Free Associations launched itself as a non-clinical, nonsectarian, and unapologetically radical periodical focused critically on the relation of psychoanalysis in all its forms to power in all its guises. The new issue reflects this emphasis as well as our reaffirmed welcome to contributors with cinematic, literary and cultural studies bents. Still, we especially encourage contributions addressing politics in its most expansive sense of the ‘the personal being the political’ (and vice versa) in daily life, in the professions, in the associations, in our methods, in our fragile world.            Apart from standard articles, comments, interviews, and book reviews, we invite ‘Reports from the Field’ from our readers in the clinics, in consulting rooms, in the academies and anywhere else they venture.  We also encourage exchanges and debates generated by current articles.  A section on ‘Treats and Treatments’ allows for pertinent whimsies and interesting oddities.  We appreciate your continuing loyalty and welcome aboard fresh fellow voyagers.