Jessica Benjamin is one of the most important and influential psychoanalysts of the last 4 decades. She is one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, a movement that has by now expanded over the globe and was also one of the first to introduce feminism and gender studies into psychoanalytic thought.

This paper explores an open frontier between psychoanalysis and critical theory, the relations between subjective experience and collective history. Its drive is a concern with the question of freedom: How might contemporary psychoanalysis help us think about freedom? How could it, as a practice, help us to be free?

My reply to the commentaries first addresses the question of the relations between psychoanalytic theory and practice. Drawing on the ancient Greek concept of theoria, I expand on this question by evoking a third register, that of psychoanalysis as a collective that theorizes and practices in a particular socio-historical context.

This article attends the intersection of personal and collective memory. Drawing on the author's childhood memories, particularly those of his grandmother, the article explores the ways in which one's past is registered and reexperienced as an ongoing relation between intimate recollections and grand historical narratives.

One way to view the relation between mind and politics is to see society as oppressive. But here the author also understands discourse, including interpellation, as facilitative: subjects of ourselves and subjects to social forces, we can have the social context we need only if we find ourselves through it.

In June 2007 the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) hosted an online colloquium on the topic of masculinity.

This paper suggests that social and historical forces play an unconscious yet decisive role in our lives.

One way to view the relation between mind and politics is to see society as oppressive. But here the author also understands discourse, including interpellation, as facilitative: subjects of ourselves and subjects to social forces, we can have the social context we need only if we find ourselves through it.

A while ago, a few of us, Israelis who live in New York and others on a visit from Israel, gathered for an evening at the Brooklyn house of a friend. Over dinner and wine, a conversation developed about the extent to which parents have influence on the choices their children make.

Suchet's paper is an inspiring demonstration of the power of openness and vulnerability. It offers a clinically daring and theoretically far-reaching account of the transformation that can sometimes occur in the psychoanalytic relationship.

In my discussion of Janine Puget's deeply thought-provoking paper, I focus on her central argument that the subject's interior world and the world of intersubjective relationships answer to different logics and evolve along separate developmental paths.

This paper suggests that social and historical forces play an unconscious yet decisive role in our lives. Telling the story of a conversation between Israeli parents about the prospect of their children becoming soldiers, and of an analytic relationship between two Israelis.

This commentary opens in strong agreement with Annie Stopford's project, to contemplate the prospect of a non-normative psychoanalysis.

In June 2007 the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) hosted an online colloquium on the topic of masculinity.

The paper engages the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his critique of ontological thought and knowing, to examine some of the basic premises of psychoanalysis.

The author comments on several questions raised in Harris's and Reis's discussions of “An Other in Psychoanalysis.” He elaborates on the notion of ambivalence between the general and particular as a theoretical and ethical perspective in psychoanalytic thought and practice.