As if we didn’t have enough issues already, we have started a print magazine devoted to psychoanalysis called Parapraxis.

To inquire into and uncover the psychosocial dimension of our lives—investigating social, political, and personal issues in relation to violence and conflict, gender and sexuality, racism and diasporic experience, and care and welfare—is the mission of this magazine. Hitching a ride to society’s ongoing return to Sigmund Freud in the twenty-first century, Parapraxis is a psychoanalytically oriented supplement to the existing venues of radical critique and historical materialism. Critically aware of the limits of psychoanalytic thinking and institutions, the magazine includes reviews, reported pieces, columns on culture and social movements, and thematic clusters of feature essays. We believe this magazine will reinvigorate leftist psychoanalytic thought in the academy and the clinic, but we address a more general audience. Whereas there are many literary magazines and leftist magazines, there are no popular magazines devoted exclusively to the advancement of psychoanalytic thinking.

The magazine will not hew dogmatically to any particular psychoanalytic persuasion (whether organized under the name of Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Frantz Fanon, or Freud himself). This is not because our contributors don’t think from within those traditions, but because we are committed to the relatively unknown endeavor of trying to engender a psychoanalysis for the twenty-first century. The magazine draws upon the practice’s older traditions, but we are not entombed within them. Our editorial team reflects this diversity of persuasion in theoretical and clinical approaches, and our contributing editors range from academic literary theorists to artists to clinicians to organizers; some of them are public-facing writers; some of them are experts in race; and others in sex / gender. Likewise, our editorial advisory board is comprised of some of the most talented and well-known thinkers in the field. We are all, nevertheless, committed to the radical horizon of political emancipation, and we are a resource for clinics, universities, and the public alike.

This magazine is a venue for theoretical debate about the meaning and role of psychoanalysis today by placing and translating psychoanalytic practice and thought into the popular idiom of existing social and political critique. We also maintain the theoretical and practical rigor germane to the psychoanalytic tradition. At the start of every issue, the editors orient the reader to the issue and a salient set of psychoanalytic problems—along with the issue’s writers and insights. In keeping with the name of the magazine, we will close each issue with a meditation on a historical, theoretical, or practical blunder from within the psychoanalytic tradition, either committed by Freud himself or those who have thought and practiced in his name. “From error to error,” Freud wrote, “one discovers the whole truth.” This is the guiding light of the magazine, editorially and otherwise.

In order to weather today's difficult realities, or to read and write about the psychical dimensions of everyday life, it is hard to know where to turn. For many, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis might be available, but it is often too costly on top of the drudgery of making a living and then, well, spending that life. Likewise, it's perhaps not very clear to people, who would avail themselves of psychoanalysis, what exactly psychoanalytic practice and the cure entails. This is part and parcel of the fact that psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century is often cloistered and inward-looking, sometimes violent, and the more popular and public-minded thinking around psychoanalysis is passed through the academy and broader clinical institutions, or shoehorned into other publishing venues. Parapraxis aims to provide a home for psychoanalytic writing and creativity, addressed to the public. We exist not merely to educate about psychoanalytic theory and practice, but also to provide a concrete way for readers and writers to work through their psychic life by way of the written word.