From the Editor
by Loong Kwok, Psy.D.
The theme of the 2015 Division 39 Spring Meeting is "Life in Psychoanalysis in Life." I've heard it explained as psychoanalysis off the couch. The basic idea is that lines have been drawn around psychoanalysis, limiting it to certain domains. I believe this is true. As my colleague Tiffany McLain has said, psychoanalysis has a marketing problem. Most of the people writing about psychoanalysis to a wider audience are not psychoanalysts. Many times people have begun conversations (polite critiques, really, with some not so polite) by citing Freud. While I'm a fan of Freud, I still like to point out that there have been over 50 years of thinking and development since he stopped writing.
This public unfamiliarity with modern psychoanalytic thought is our responsibility.
To engage a wider audience, we have to address a wider audience. One way we might do so is expand the topic matter we examine. After all, how do we decide something is suitable for consideration? I imagine that there are things that would not feel like a productive use of our time. However, I would argue that this is a false limitation. What matters to us matters, regardless of whether someone else (or we ourselves) deem it worthy or not. At the risk of being seen as (silly? immature?) irrelevant, I'll commit to writing more about video games, comic books, and science fiction - all forms of storytelling that have been meaningful to me. In doing so, I hope I'll be able to demonstrate that psychoanalytic thought can be applied to more than the ivory tower to which we've been relegated.