A Message From the Editors

As a woman’s right to control her own body once again falls prey to ideological battles in the political arena, Susan Gutwill, Jane Hassinger, and Jane Kenner consider some of the psychoanalytic implications in this struggle. Gutwill offers a dynamic analysis of the assault on women’s reproductive rights; Hassinger turns to the abortion workers themselves whose dilemma is rarely considered, and Kenner describes how this ongoing debate led her into activism. Lynne Layton’s provocative answer to the question, "What is psychoanalytic activism?", deconstructs the privileged place from which so many clinicians work, questioning the foundations that support psychoanalytic activism. In his review of First Do No Harm, edited by Harris and Botticelli, Stephen Hartman concludes that this “heroic text … brings the reader to the battlefield and home again so that we may understand the role of soldier as well as those of historian, activist, and psychoanalyst.”

At least a dozen of the eighteen chapters in this volume have been written by Section IX members. Further reports from psychoanalytic reporters, Susan Mailer, Elsa First, and Michele Barnett mark the first anniversary of the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti. In her column, Section IX President, Alice Shaw, lists some of the many ongoing initiatives in which section members are engaged. Ghislaine Boulanger and Ruth Fallenbaum.