It is my hope that the present moment will be an auspicious one in which to re-open the mouth and ear of the

Observing Ego. With the period of APA probation nearing its culmination and the site visit to re-establish accreditation a few months hence, it has been a difficult and sometimes painful period of self-analysis and of change, and the OE can also 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 Oedipal crisis in his confrontation with desire and the fathers No! what is to be hoped for is the 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 regarded form 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. A change 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 what our 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 new website. The legacy of former editors Jason Royal and Alex Crumbley lives on both in the 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 will speak 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 be representative of the program, that you, my colleagues and friends, will not find yourselves in it. Jeff Erbe joked that, given the strong Lacanian presence in the first issue and 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 as imaginary construction may offer some guidance as I try to envision what role the OE may take up in the program. Lacan says this in his description of the construction of the ego 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 remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subjects becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality. (Lacan, 1949/2002, p. 76)

I know that this desire to synthesize runs strong in me. And so I have tried to bring the different pieces, when I could, into dialogue, and even now I try to tie them up neatly with ribbons and bows and impressive quotations. I also recognize that this impossible and imaginary synthesizing is a defensive closing, frightening as I sometimes find the open, unknown, divided. Forgive me the ballast of one more quotation, this one from the philosopher Alphonso Lingis, who said: Ex-istence understood etymologically is not so much a state or a stance as a movement, which is by conceiving of a divergence from itself or a potentiality of itself and casting itself into that divergence with all that it is. (Lingis, 1994, p.6) Let me stop prattling on and throw myself and you into the divergent voices that make up the issue and the blessedly wounded body of our program. But first let me thank Ian Pervil for designing the website, Jason Royal for editorial assistance and for passing on the OE to me, Andrew Gerber and Paola Mieli for their gracious granting of interviews, and to the contributors: Danielle Benveniste, Jeff Erbe, Felix Garcia, Jason Royal, and Hannah Wallerstein. I welcome comments, critiques, questions, and future pieces, which can either be posted directly in the comments section at the bottom of each piece or by email observingego.cuny@gmail.com. Thank you for reading. References Lacan, J. (2002). crits (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W.W. Norton. Lingis, A. (1994). Foreign Bodies. New York: Routledge. Webster, J. (2011). Stasis. Division/Review: A quarterly psychoanalytic forum, 1, 3536.