The latest issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues arrives with three substantial article clusters on the transformative power of singular words, dissociated anti-Blackness, and queer creative possibility, alongside an editorial note announcing a significant expansion of the journal’s editorial board. Two pieces are freely available to all readers.
Free to Read: Note from the Editors
The editorial note from Lauren Levine and Stephen Hartman is brief but significant, and freely available in both English and Spanish. The editors announce thirteen new associate editors joining the Psychoanalytic Dialogues board, a deliberately diverse group whose backgrounds span the relational psychoanalytic world. They also note that the journal has begun publishing original articles and essays in Spanish alongside English translations, reflecting the growth of its Latin American and Iberian readership.
Free to Read: Dancing with Emily
The other freely available piece is Stuart N. Singer’s response to Emily Seidel’s lead article on psychic mobility and queer creative possibility. Singer brings a rare combination of perspectives to the discussion: he spent fifteen years as a professional modern dancer and in opera productions before retraining as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic candidate. His response to Seidel draws on this dual experience with unusual intimacy and specificity, tracing the ways in which his decade-long creative practice and his first long-term psychotherapeutic treatment overlapped and mutually informed one another. As he puts it, new modes of embodiment in dancing opened new material in psychotherapy, and vice versa. He focuses in particular on Seidel’s concept of the shared imaginative space that both dance and psychoanalysis can activate and on the role of queer theory’s critique of social narrowing, asking how both disciplines might support queerer, more three-dimensional movements of imagination and embodiment. It is a generous, personal, and intellectually rich response.
The Singular Word
The issue’s first article cluster centres on Noa Heiman and Ronnie Carmeli’s piece on the transformative power of singular words in the analytic encounter. Responses come from Jeanine M. Vivona, whose title, A Word is Worth a Thousand Words, suggests a complementary rather than contrarian perspective, and Stuart A. Pizer on the manifold function of singular words. Heiman and Carmeli reply, gathering the threads under the heading The Functions of Language and Singular Words.
Dissociated Anti-Blackness
The issue’s most-read piece is Chanda D. Griffin’s The White Supremacist Within: Dissociated Anti-Blackness and Racial Multiplicity. The title speaks for itself in terms of ambition and directness. Three responses follow: Annie Lee Jones offers reveries on Griffin’s argument; Lynne Layton provides a commentary situating it within broader psychoanalytic debates; and Adam J. Rodríguez writes from his own subject position, exploring the space between Ricanness and dissociated whiteness-anti-Blackness. Griffin replies with a piece asking whether there is a beyond to the Black and White binary, a question that opens rather than closes the conversation.
Queer Creative Possibility
The issue’s third cluster centres on Emily Seidel’s Keeping the Channel Open: Psychic Mobility and Queer, Creative Possibility . Seidel brings modern dance, psychoanalysis, and queer theory into close proximity, exploring how each discipline illuminates the others around questions of movement, imagination, and aliveness. Amy Schwartz Cooney responds with a piece on psychic deadness and the relational emergence of aliveness. Sandy Silverman’s response, A Neigh and a Gallop into Survival, promises a more idiosyncratic angle. Singer’s freely available Dancing with Emily is the third response. Seidel replies with Queer Carriage: Dancing, Writing, and Moving within an Embodied Psychoanalysis.
The two open access pieces can be read in full on the website and you can see a full list of the remaining content.