Editor's Introduction

On December 7, 1996 a conference on Psychoanalysis and Physics was held at the New School for Social Research under the auspices of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. I had long had the idea of organizing such an event, but it did not become a reality until Teresa Brennan, then director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program, enthusiastically endorsed my proposal. It was not difficult to choose the speakers. Barry Opatow, a practicing psychoanalyst, has a background in physics which he unites with his profound philosophical investigations of psychoanalytic metapsychology. Jean Schneider, a practicing astrophysicist, has a long standing interest in the intersection of psychoanalysis, epistemology, and theoretical physics. Teresa Brennan, an academic specialist in psychoanalysis and feminism, has consistently attended to questions of time, space, and energy in her rigorous syntheses of psychoanalytic and social theories. My own interest in the topic stems from my background in deconstruction and my psychoanalytic practice. Both have led me to think that energic theories are as necessary as they are conceptually risky. Once the necessity and the risk are assumed, however, some of the most important topics of contemporary thought converge. All the papers in this volume, which are more highly elaborated versions of the ones presented at the conference, share this spirit. A word about the event itself. We simply organized it and sent out a mailing, not knowing what to expect. On the day, there was a capacity audience, of an ideal, interdisciplinary kind—psychoanalysts, physicists, astrophysicists, psychologists, philosophers, academics and graduate students from other disciplines. Debate and questioning was intense between the papers. There was a sense of a new opening, of the possibility of revival of investigation into basic questions of mind and science. Any reader interested in the topic will probably be aware of conspicuous absences of concepts and references throughout. Hopefully more thought and writing on this essential, if recondite, topic will be stimulated.