Editors’ Introduction

We begin our latest issue with the exciting announcement that starting in early 2026 the EJP will be formally joining the Open Library of the Humanities!

Some background: Faced with an increasingly difficult publishing landscape, we looked around to see what partnerships and arrangements we might enter into that would allow us to move forward as a journal. Thanks to the diligent efforts of our colleague and previous Managing Editor, Robert Cavooris, we found out about the Open Library of the Humanities. To quote from their materials:

“The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an award-winning diamond open access publisher of internationally leading academic scholarship. Our goal is to liberate university research from commercial control. We believe that scholarship should be academic-led and community-owned… Since 2013, the OLH has become one of the most prestigious diamond open access publishers of humanities journals. We leverage international library funding to return journals to the academic communities that founded them. Working closely with scholarly associations and research funders, we protect niche humanities fields and preserve their research cultures for the future”

There is so much more we could say about OLH, but we instead urge you to look over their website, Open Library of Humanities. You can read the OLH/EJP announcement here: European Journal of Psychoanalysis moves to the Open Library of Humanities – Open Library of Humanities

It is difficult to convey the enormous sense of elation and gratitude we feel with this development. Additionally, with the move to OLH, all past and present EJP articles will now receive a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), strengthening scholarly referencing and securing the journal’s archival permanence.

It is important to note that even with our OLH partnership, we still retain all rights over EJP, thereby maintaining our independence, which has always been a singular priority for us.

Volume 12 No 1

Our new issue took some time in the making. Featuring five stand-alone articles, an exchange by two EJP editors on the question of autism, a four way conversation between Darian Leader, Jamieson Webster and the two authors of this editors’ note on Leader’s newest book Is it Ever Just Sex?, a translated text by Daniel Koren and four outstanding book review essays, our newest issue is a generative landscape that should prove valuable to our many and varied readers.

What better way to begin our newest issue than with Daniel Deweese’s Freud’s Compass: A Critical Defense of the Oedipus Complex. Arguing for the enduring relevance and utility of Freud’s Oedipus Complex as a critical-clinical tool in contemporary psychoanalysis, Deweese challenges the notion that it has been overcome, and instead offers that this supposed “overcoming” of the Oedipus complex only serves to deepen the underlying problem. Despite all assurances, the author contends that we are still navigating the “Oedipal Sea” and that we would do well to continue to attend to the Oedipal compass in our psychoanalytic practice.

Continuing our foray into the vexed intersection of Artificial Intelligence and psychoanalysis, our next article, by Rob Geal, asks whether discursive relations with large language models (LLMs) might be able to generate new nonhuman forms of thought or subjectivity, or do they merely replicate and reinforce human patterns of thought and knowledge. Entitled A Large Language Model is Structured Like the Unconscious: The (Ordinary) Perverse Psychosis of AI bridges some of the existing Lacanian analyses of AI and goes on to explore whether the hypothetical AI of science fiction and philosophical speculation offers various possibilities for thought and subjectivity beyond the constraints of the human mind. Weaving a theoretically dense and lively argument, the author argues that the kind of thought and knowledge generated by our interactions with LLMs is best described as something like an (ordinary) perverse psychosis.

Next up is the lively and wide-ranging conversation between Darian Leader, Jamieson Webster, Thomas Marchevsky, and Fernando Castrillón on the subject of Leader’s newest book Is it Ever Just Sex? Addressing themes as diverse as separation, the problems with toxic masculinity discourse, guilt and violence, the four-way discussion opens up a series of social and clinical difficulties that psychoanalysts would do well to attend to.

We continue with a fascinating exchange between Founding EJP Editor, Sergio Benvenuto and long-time editor and contributor Benjamin Davidson on the question of autism. Developing a novel approach to the subject, Benvenuto makes a singular contribution to the psychoanalytic literature, prompting a learned and appreciative critique by Davidson that extends the argument further. A slow and detailed reading of the exchange provides a wealth of insight with direct relevance for the clinic.

We follow up this worthwhile exchange with Nicole Monaco’s earnest contribution, The Triangle of Desire: Freud, Sidonie and Lacan. Working directly with Lacan’s theorization regarding jouissance, Monaco re-reads the case of Sidonie Csillag, Freud’s (1953) patient in “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” a case that served Lacan in his evolving theory of desire and the emergence of object a between 1957 and 1963. The paper revisits key concepts like the niederkommen in relation to Lacan’s claim that his teaching aims to detach the Other from object a and argues for a reading of Sidonie in the feminine position, affirming Lacan’s insights about the locus of Other jouissance and contending with the limits of sexuation.

Frederic Forest is the author of our next piece, entitled The Reticular System in Freud’s and Lacan’s Theories: A Founding Concept in the Service of a Therapeutic Ambition and a Scientific Ideal. An inspired and complex text, Forest explores the theoretical systems of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan through the concept of a “reticular system.” Arguing that in spite of the fact that Freud never explicitly noted it, his descriptions of psychic processes as networks of interconnected representations are everywhere in his work. Freud structures psychoanalysis around a network (psychic representations), a fluid (libido and affect), and a regulatory function (the pleasure-displeasure principle). The combination of these three elements forms what we call a reticular system. Lacan adapts this system with some key substitutions. The article ends by showing how the reticular system allows us to appreciate the scientific ambitions of psychoanalysis in a new way.

Our next article, penned by Anderson de Souza Sant’Anna, and titled Self, Sinthome, and Psychic Diversity: Transcending Boundaries between Neurosis and Psychosis, explores the application of the sinthome mechanism beyond psychotic and borderline structures, extending it to other psychic configurations. Drawing on Mead’s concept of the “self,” Bastide’s insights into social and cultural influences, and Lacan’s theory of subjectivation, the article examines how Lacan’s concept of the sinthome operates transversally across different psychic structures, offering stabilization regardless of clinical categorization. The article concludes by discussing the clinical implications and encourages further exploration of the sinthome in diverse cultural and social contexts.

As is our custom, we regularly feature a translated article from one of our other language sections, in this case Spanish. Under the banner of Idiom, we highlight Daniel Koren’s wonderful essay Translation / Transduction, which originally appeared in our founding issue of the Spanish section in 2023. Focusing on the topic of translation as addressed by Freud and Lacan, Koren takes up the renowned clinical example of Serge Leclaire’s “unicorn’s dream” with its exclamation Poord’JeLi to open the door to the conception of a beyond of translation, for which he proposes the term of transduction. It’s not a question of a translation from one language to another, or from one system to another, but of a change in register that signals a qualitative difference in the psychoanalyst’s doing.

Our final movement in this volume, a collection of four book reviews, opens with Jimena Marti Haik’s compelling and extensive review of Domenico Cosenza’s A Lacanian Reading of Anorexia. This long-form essay situates anorexia not in terms of classical pathology but rather as a subjective solution organized around the refusal of the “object nothing.” Linking Cosenza’s theses to resignation syndrome in refugee children, this piece foregrounds anorexia as a libidinal withdrawal in the face of un–metabolizable social trauma. Haik indicates that at present, anorexia functions as an “Ur–symptom”, a response to the decline of the Name–of–the–Father and the rise of superegoic self–therapies, where the body becomes the surface for the management of lack. In this way, the anorexic’s silent “no” indexes the shift from the classical clinic of metaphor, to the contemporary clinic of the Real “beyond the signifier.”

Pressing forward we turn to Bitextuality, Emma Lieber’s brilliant essay composed of a dialogue between two texts: Thomas Olver’s Radical Freud: Reconstructing the Bisexuality Thesis, and Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding. This beautiful and refreshingly original review of not one, but two books confronts us with an essential question: what forms of writing can intervene on psychoanalysis today? On this basis, the essay explores how the first person (namely, “every person who takes up the pronoun ‘I’”) is itself the structural inscription of sexuation. The proliferating, non–identical “I”s of Elkin’s novel stand against Olver’s attempt to avoid the personal form of address, a contradiction revealing the impossibility of exiting an enunciative position—if epistemology, sexual difference, and style stand (or fall) together, then it would seem that psychoanalytic writing is always already sexuated.

Up next is an instructive review of Todd McGowan’s The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, by Melvin Kivinen. This essay situates Lacan among key political and philosophical interlocutors and underscores the generativity of Lacan’s “middle” Hegelian period. Kivinen emphasizes that this period marks a decisive shift away from Kantian dualism, departs from Kojève’s logic of recognition, and resists Žižek’s conflation of quilting point and master signifier. It is in this Hegelian phase that the quilting point becomes structurally tied to contradiction and the retroactive production of meaning. The essay invites the further question of how such logics might operate within psychoanalytic praxis itself.

Our final selection of volume 12.1, a review essay by Andrea Guerra, forcefully argues that Pavón–Cuéllar’s Psicoanálisis y Colonialidad is a pivotal text for psychoanalysis. Staking out an anticolonial stance (as differentiated from postcolonial and decolonial frameworks), the essay situates Freud’s conceptual elaborations against the backdrop of colonial massacres, demanding that psychoanalysis confront the consequences of its Eurocentric foundations. In this way, the notion of “the unconscious is politics” becomes an operative analytic principle, a kind of knowing in analytic praxis. Accordingly, the review highlights how Pavón–Cuéllar proposes anticolonial uses of Freudian theory — a set of orientations for how psychoanalysis might produce “another world, with another kind of subject.”

By way of ending, we highlight several upcoming EJP publications, beginning with our second issue in Spanish, spearheaded by the always remarkable Benjamín Mayer Foulkes and the brilliant folks at 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos. As well, we have 3 new Salon features coming soon, on Autism, the Climate Catastrophe and Technology and AI. See our “On the Horizon” section on the EJP website for more information on each of these.

And we could not sign off this Introduction without thanking our outstanding Managing Editor, Lily Rose Cardasis for her remarkable work. Lily’s sophistication, elegance and focused attention have allowed us to publish what is in many ways our most complex and lengthy issue. Thank you, Lily, for joining in the work with us. We deeply appreciate your many talents.