8/3/2019 From the Editor Issue 1

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It is my hope that the present moment will be an auspicious one in which to re-open themouth and ear of the Observing Ego. With the period of APA probation nearing itsculmination and the site visit to re-establish accreditation a few months hence, it has beena difficult and sometimes painful period of self-analysis and of change, and the OE canalso be a forum for this reflection. As in psychoanalysis, perhaps it is only in speaking

that we may hear And as in analysis, and as in the childs traversal of the Oedipalcrisis in his confrontation with desire and the fathers No! what is to be hoped for isthe creation of a new position.

The hope is for sublimation, that we may will our wound. Jamieson Webster, alumni of the program, psychoanalyst, and author has this to say about that most highly regardedform of psychic transformation:

Sublimation, if it is about the possibility of the new, demands a kind of cutting: of new channels, of new vicissitudes, of a new relation between body and world. Achange in surface and structure. Sublimation is this cut. (Webster, 2011, p.36)

The cut has been made, the injury sustained. By a psychic act of re-transcription, of Nachtrglichkeit , we must reclaim the cut as our own if we are to be the authors of whatour program is to become. And so, may we be opened up; may our desire alight by our wound so that something new can come forth.

So it is with the Observing Ego, like the program at large and like the subject through psychoanalysis: the past is not disavowed but, rather, reworked creating something new.This is my inaugural issue as editor of the OE, and it marks the launch of the newwebsite. The legacy of former editors Jason Royal and Alex Crumbley lives on both inthe current issue and in the Archives, and I encourage readers, if they havent already, to

read these older pieces to try to understand some small bit about the recent history of our program, so that we may imagine where we are going. And I hope that more of you willspeak so that we may hear the dreams, parapraxes, and jokes that guide us forward.

Naturally, I worry that my idiosyncratic vision for the newsletter will not berepresentative of the program, that you, my colleagues and friends, will not findyourselves in it. Jeff Erbe joked that, given the strong Lacanian presence in the first issueand given Lacans disdain for the ego, I might have to change the name of the newsletter.Although I have no intention of doing so, I do wonder if Lacans critique of the ego asimaginary construction may offer some guidance as I try to envision what role the OEmay take up in the program. Lacan says this in his description of the construction of theego in the mirror stage:

But the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remainirreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptoticallyapproach the subjects becoming, no matter how successful the dialecticalsyntheses by which he must resolve, as I , his discordance with his own reality.(Lacan, 1949/2002, p. 76)

8/3/2019 From the Editor Issue 1

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