Letter from the Editor
Letter from the Editor
Kevin Boileau, PhD
Each year that I write this letter for the EPIS journal, I am naturally inclined to review the state of the institute and its programs, including the journal. Institutes of this nature go through many growth phases, shifts and turns in mission, and a cycling of members as they make their own ways professionally. The Journal represents the noble attempts of various members and associates to put new ideas to pen hopefully to advance
the field in some way. Our seminars and other educational programs are constant in their attempts to review old materials while forging into the new and unexplored. The radio show continues to open fresh discussion in a friendly, conversational style, some of which is published by EPIS Press. Yet, it is the EPIS journal that seriously participates in the triple-dialogues of phenomenology, critical theory, and psychoanalysis year after year.
The EPIS journal, Presencing EPIS, is peer-reviewed, of course, and represents exciting developments in the convergence of three powerful discourses concerning subjectivity. These discourses, each in their own way, push us to think against ourselves, a thinking that is vigilant and suspicious of what we believe to be true. This past school year, we started to focus on creativity and violence as we trudged forward in our investigations and searches. The topic of the 2017 journal issue reflects that. While this group of papers does not reflect all that could be said about these important topics and their related issues, they are important perspectives within these discourses, and the sort of participation EPIS expects.
Creativity is the cynosure of the new. It constructs, builds, and presences new thoughts, new attitudes, new behavior and, sometimes, new ways of being human. By definition, violence destroys what is, leaving both positive and negative effects, some intentional and some not. Yet, we can examine these effects historically, scientifically, and through the joint discourses of phenomenology, critical theory, and psychoanalysis, develop new understandings of the human anthropology and our future possibilities. It is a particularly fertile time for our inquiries, given that the world is in dynamic transformation, which has profound reverberations in self- structure, inter-subjectivity, and culture.
It is, therefore, with great pleasure that the EPIS Press and the EPIS journal release this 2017 issue of Presencing EPIS.
Kevin Boileau, PhD
Executive Editor
September 2017