Parapraxis is committed to a relatively unknown endeavor: to engender a psychoanalysis for the twenty-first century so that we might inquire into, and uncover, the psychosocial dimension of our lives. This is the mission of the magazine.

By investigating social, political, and personal issues—in relation to violence and conflict, gender and sexuality, racism and diasporic experience, care and welfare—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 searching reviews, novel clinical writing, columns on cultural and social movements, and thematic feature essays. We believe this magazine reinvigorates 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 critical psychoanalytic thinking.

The magazine does 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). Our contributors think from within those traditions, but we are committed to the psychoanalytic project in toto—as inaugurated by Sigmund Freud in 1895, and yet still unfinished. 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. We are all 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 open each issue with a tonic retrospective on the theme under consideration, parsing out the contradictions between the psyche and the social in a given context. Then, in keeping with the name of the magazine, we 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. Between each beginning and end, our pieces risk error to name a truth. “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 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 public-minded thinking around psychoanalysis is exclusively passed through the narrow sieves of the academy and clinical institutions, or shoehorned into other publishing venues. Parapraxis aims to provide a home for psychoanalytic writing and creativity, addressed to the common reader. 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.