About the Journal
Aims and Scope
Psychoanalysis is transmitted through an apprenticeship — personal analysis, supervision, seminar — and governed by institutions that certify who may call themselves an analyst. Both the transmission and the governance are consequential, contested, and thinly researched. Most psychoanalytic journals publish clinical and theoretical work and leave the training apparatus to institutional memory.
This journal takes that apparatus as its subject. Its scope covers:
- Training and formation — the structure of psychoanalytic education, the requirement of personal analysis, seminar curricula, criteria for qualification, and comparative study of training models across traditions and countries.
- Supervision — its theory, its practice, what is transmitted in it, how it is assessed, and standards for supervisory competence.
- Ethics — the frame, confidentiality, boundaries, the handling of complaints, and the ethics of publishing clinical material.
- Standards, certification and regulation — accreditation of training institutes, certification pathways, the legal status of psychoanalytic practice across jurisdictions, and the evidence base, where any exists, for the requirements imposed.
- Clinical theory bearing on the above — theoretical and clinical work insofar as it grounds, or unsettles, what is required of candidates and practitioners.
The journal is not the right home for clinical case studies with no bearing on formation or standards, nor for psychoanalytic readings of culture, literature or politics; the alliance's other titles carry that work. Manuscripts of that kind are declined at screening with a redirection rather than a verdict.
Comparative and critical work is expressly welcome, including work arguing that a widely required element of training lacks justification. A journal published by a standards body that only ever published defences of standards would not be worth reading.
Peer Review Process
The journal operates double-anonymous peer review: authors and reviewers are not disclosed to one another at any stage.
Submissions are screened by the editors for scope, ethical compliance and adequacy, and may be declined at that stage with reasons. Manuscripts that pass screening go to at least two independent reviewers without institutional affiliation or recent collaboration with the authors. Psychoanalytic communities are small and schools are recognisable from citation habits alone; where anonymity cannot realistically be maintained, the editors say so rather than maintain a fiction. Material disagreement is resolved by a third review; the decision rests with the handling editor.
Decisions are one of four: accept; accept with minor revisions; major revisions with a further round of review; or decline. The target interval between submission and first decision is eight weeks.
Reviewers are asked to assess the work on its own terms. A manuscript written from a Kleinian, Lacanian, relational, ego-psychological or independent position is to be judged by the coherence and evidential standards of its own tradition, not by the reviewer's. Disagreement with a school is not grounds for rejection; incoherence within one is.
Publication Frequency
The journal publishes on a continuous basis: articles appear as soon as final editing is complete, and are gathered into annual volumes for citation and indexing.
Publication Ethics
The journal follows the COPE Core Practices, and authorship follows the ICMJE criteria. All submissions are screened for similarity against published literature.
Clinical material carries a specific obligation. The analysand cannot consent freely to publication while the analysis is in progress: the request itself enters the transference. Authors must therefore either disguise the material to the point at which the person could not be recognised by anyone other than themselves — altering identifying detail, not merely removing names — or obtain written consent after the analysis has ended, and say in the article which route was taken. Composite cases are acceptable and must be declared as composites. Where disguise and clinical truth conflict, disguise governs, and the author should say what was sacrificed.
Allegations of misconduct are investigated under the COPE flowcharts. Corrections, expressions of concern and retractions are published in a form linked bidirectionally to the original article.
Archiving
The journal participates in the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS distributed archiving networks, which permit participating libraries to create permanent archives for preservation and restoration.
