PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW, THE

The contemporary Psychoanalytic Review can trace its lineage to two disparate yet converging journals in the history of American psychoanalysis.

The original Psychoanalytic Review was founded in 1913, making it the first English-language journal dedicated to psychoanalysis, and as the oldest continuously published psychoanalytic journal in the world. Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866-1945), one of the journal's founders, was a neurologist who became interested in psychoanalysis through the influence of Abraham Arden Brill. He was also influenced by the writings of Adler and Jung, and advocated for the journal a general psychodynamic perspective on behavior, free of sectarian bias. The other founder, William Alanson White (1870-1937) was superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C., and one of the pioneers in psychoanalytic psychiatry.

Psychoanalysis, the other parent of the present journal, was founded in 1952 by the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), the first publication of its time situated and representing a non-medical training institute. Theodor Reik was Editor-in-Chief, and the editors were John Gustin and, later, Clement Staff. In 1958, Psychoanalysis absorbed The Psychoanalytic Review and for the next five years appeared as Psychoanalysis and The Psychoanalytic Review, under the direction of Marie Coleman Nelson as managing editor and Murray Sherman as assistant editor and later as co-editor and editor.

The name Psychoanalysis was dropped for the first issue of 1963 and henceforth the journal has been known as The Psychoanalytic Review, having been edited by Marie Nelson, Murray Sherman, Leila Lerner, and Martin Schulman.

The Review has occupied a unique niche in the history of the psychoanalytic movement, both in the United States and in the international arena. It has always represented a non-sectarian, open venue for all psychoanalytic perspectives. This openness, and refusal to see psychoanalysis as a finite body of truism analogous to a religion led Ernest Jones, in 1924, to call it a "refuge of all malcontents." Schulman sees it, rather, as a forum for those, not malcontent, but discontent with orthodoxy, sectarianism, dogma, and exclusionism. While scholarship and literary style are the prerequisites for the acceptance of articles, the journal is a setting for all legitimate perspectives within the psychoanalytic movement.

It has published representational articles by classical Freudians, Ego psychologists, object-relations theorists, Kleinians, self-psychologists, Lacanians, and even contemporary Jungian theorists.

It has continued to be committed not only to clinical psychoanalysis, but to a psychoanalytic exploration of general culture, seeing psychoanalysis as informed by other disciplines, rather than reducing all discourses to a superordinate psychoanalytic frame. It is representative of the general philosophy of critical inquiry, and psychoanalytic scientific humanism, the historical foundational core of psychoanalysis.

Martin A. Schulman

See also: National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.