We put out the call for papers for the Art and Psyche in the City conference many months before the July 2012 conference date. Among the proposals that were submitted were, curiously, three whose subject was rubble or garbage or the detritus of our contemporary life. It would appear, by this confluence of papers, that at this particular moment in our cultural history we are challenged to make meaning of what we discard and that we discard. Two of the papers are presented here. As a pair, they form a set of opposites, each describing the meaning-making process of art-making. The first is Clarissa Lewis' piece about the "Leslie Street Spit" in Toronto Canada. She takes us on a journey, over time, full of whimsy and playfulness and at moments quite poignant. By contrast Janice Shapiro's paper is also a journey, but into the dark world of the lost and discarded, things and people alike. Both papers bring us powerful examples of the human impulse to create. Each of them gives form to the dialogue between ego and psyche, as outer objects come to express unspoken or unspeakable parts of an inner world.

Melinda Haas
Art and Psyche Working Group