CRITICA

“CRITICA” is this new newsletter. The word Critica points to the potential for dialogue that involves our current times for critical thinking, creativity, and openness, leading to a new twist in psychoanalytic writing.

In times of change, our editorial team was faced with attempting to address the need for a new forum for psychoanalytic ideas born in conversation with social science, critical thinking, and the arts – a newsletter which would be kaleidoscopic in nature.

In our conversations, a magazine published after the war titled “Critique edited by Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Pierre Prévost caught our attention.

Commenting on the magazine, Philippe Roger (2006) mentions that “Critique is arguably the most original, and surely the most unclassifiable….”. In the first issue the editor said it hoped “To provide as complete a glimpse as possible of the various activities of the human mind in the domains of literary creation, philosophical reflections and historical scientific and economic research.” p.694.

Critique sounded like an interesting platform to convey aspects of psychoanalytic thinking that would integrate historical, political and philosophical ground.

From a psychoanalytic point we would like to expand more on the role of the political, such as the important issues of race, gender, sexuality and the interplay of the psychic and the social. Furthermore, we would like to propose a reading of psychoanalysis that is more contemporary; integrating the French school, the new Lacan, the middle school, and the latest in relational–intersubjective models.

Essential also to psychoanalysis are the reviews of books, films, poetry, the arts and music, which bring a multifaceted perspective on understanding the psyche. In brief our new format will include a multidisciplinary perspective with a particular new voice in psychoanalytic literature.

We intend this platform to allow for a kind of writing that instead of promoting control and linearity, would create rupture and tension in a similar way that the language of our unconscious allows for new meanings to be created.

Philippe Roger (2006) Critique, The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought Edited by: Lawrence D. Kritzman. Columbia University Press, New York.