Current Issue
Issue 3, Volume 105, 2024
This Year’s Cover: Achilles and War
For this year’s cover of the International Journal, we continue with the theme of portrayals from Greek myth on vases, this time showing Achilles binding the wounds of Patroclus. At this time of extreme violence in various wars, old and new, it’s as though the terrible figure of Achilles is reborn in our times. Homer’s Iliad is replete with descriptions of his remorseless violence: one is staggered by the sheer numbers of those whom he slays, often with cool precision, emotionally detached as he delivers death and misery. Yet this same killing machine has his moments of care and love, particularly as he tends his friend Patroclus: our cover shows him binding Patroclus’ wounds with evident loving attention and concern.
But this softness evaporates when his hatred is inflamed, and the entire story of the Trojan War crescendos to the point where, in response to Hector’s killing of Patroclus, Achilles fights Hector in a state of incandescent rage, not only killing him but mutilating his body and pouring insult upon insult upon Hector’s family and people through the intensity of his cruelty.
Finally, Troy itself is destroyed and sacked, its people ruined through rape and pillage. Once again, one is astonished by the capacity of the ancient Greeks to reflect so truthfully both the love and the hatred in human nature. When so many are tortured and killed in our day, this particular moment of men engaging in love and healing rather than in horrible destruction seems important to remember, to bear at the front of our minds, and of course to hope that this current of love can somehow become stronger than the alternating current of hatred.
Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique
Rethinking the concepts of the unconscious and analytic time
Thomas H. Ogden
Psychoanalysis in the Community
A machine of the same: Repetition in the foundational discourse of the Argentinean “being” (1976–1983)
Cecilia Taiana
The inability to mourn: Past and current challenges for psychoanalysis
Anna Christopoulos
Psychoanalytic Controversy
How can psychoanalytic interpretations of political situations have effects as actions?
Michael Rustin
Transforming psychoanalysis for the public
Pratyusha Tummala-Narra
Clinical territories
Magda Khouri
In a time of theoretical expansion and change, don’t throw babies out with the bath water
Sally Weintrobe
Obituary
Book Reviews
The surviving object: psychoanalytic clinical essays on psychic survival-of-the object
Marie Lenormand
Contro-tempo. La temporalità del pensiero e della storia nella clinica e nella letteratura
Gregorio Hautmann
Psychoanalysis at the crossroads: An international perspective
Kristin White
Psychoanalytic approaches to forgiveness and mental health
Steven Groarke