Psychoanalysis, right from the early days, and certainly in Freud's writing has addressed the interface between the individual, the social and the cultural. It started to address very serious social issues and became a tool for the analysis of these issues, particularly in the work of the Frankfurt school. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed 'the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant' they were of course referring to the breakdown of Enlightenment ideas, the increasing constraints of the rationalisation process and the development of genocidal technologies. Progress has always been viewed in some sort of positive light, words like freedom and emancipation spring to mind. Yet the modern world has seen some of the most horrific instances of war, terror, genocide, hate, racism and xenophobia. On the one hand we have studies of the development of Cartesian rational man, particularly through the work of Michel Foucault - Madness and Civilisation - Discipline and Punish which have an emphasis on the discourses of modern society that define reason from unreason. On the other hand we have sociologists and political theorists who concentrate on social structures - for example Zygmunt Bauman telling us that the institutions and practices of modern society have not only made genocide, racism and xenophobia possible, but eminently reasonable. The problem with these accounts is that they fail to take into account the emotional irrational and motivational side of human nature - they cannot explain hate.

Psychoanalysis and psycho-social ideas do address the visceral and eruptive nature of racism and ethnic hatred. Many critical theorists and psychoanalytic sociologists have drawn on psychoanalytic ideas to examine the massive substantive irrationality that has accompanied modernity - seeking to answer not how, but why people are racist and come to hate others. This example is just but one way that psycho-social ideas address the interface between the inner world of the individual and the multiple socio psychodynamics at work in the interface between culture, society and the political. All the papers in this volume address in some way serious social and political issues through a psycho-social lens, and in concentrating on specifics they also highlight some of the bigger discourses over the past hundred years. This edition of the journal carries on this vein of thought addressing issues such as hate speak, intrusive technologies, miscommunication, modernity and tradition and the ethics of infant sex reassignment.

Stephen Appel's paper analyses communication, or (mis) communication using psychoanalysis and clinical vignettes to illustrate his argument.  Citing Lacan - 'A letter always arrives at its destination'. Appel argues that in critical circles we should move beyond the sender-message-receiver model of communication - communication is always unsound. Rather, in elaborating on Lacan's axiom we should recognise that a letter, transformed, transforming, and via a convoluted route always arrives at its destinations. In another form of communication Cathleen Rountree provides us with a critical analysis of the film Minority Report. Rowntree explores the use of myth and shadow politics in the film, the shadow being the alter ego, the underlying or alternative politics of the story line.

Homophobic slang, argues Tasmin Wilton, exposes a profound and specific psychosocial anxiety at the root of homophobia. Wilton's paper explores the use of hate speech using empirical research based on material gathered in workshops which took place all over England, Scotland and Wales. Wilton concludes that a paranoid, anxious and conflictual discourse remains vivid and current in British culture, and this is testament to the deeply rooted nature of homophobia in the UK. Homophobic hate speech expresses a catastrophic anxiety, which threatens the social, the cultural, the bodily and the psychic. Jonathan Lang explores another discourse that of the medical profession and infant sex reassignment. In doing so, Lang addresses the ethics and experimentation in this area arguing that it is evident that the authors of medical textbooks in this area have almost completely ignored the accomplishments of social movements in the transformation of thinking about this subject.

The final two papers look at modernity or modern life from two very different perspectives - again both are linked to discourse and so called expert practices. Dave Green looks at tradition as a psycho-social concept arguing that a theoretical reclamation of tradition as both constituting and being constituted by the imagination and phantasy would restore its seemly perverse position as a dynamic mode of invention and re-invention.  Finally, Carole Smith's paper addresses two of the objects of modernity, the psychiatric discourse and technology through an examination of mind invasive technologies.