In these pages…

This is the second Special Issue containing a selection from the papers of the 7th International Sándor Ferenczi Conference, which was held in Buenos Aires in 2009. The two Special Issues were guest edited by Dr. Pedro J. Boschan, the Chair of the Conference. The first was published in December of 2011 (American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2011, Vol. 70/4). The papers published in this issue were selected and edited by Dr. Boschan.

The central theme of the Buenos Aires Conference was introjection and transference. As Dr. Boschan explained in the First Issue: introjection—a concept created by Ferenczi in 1909—, projection and transference highlighted the importance of the relationship with external reality in the structuring of the psyche. The lasting acknowledgment of the effects of reality on our psyche has important ideological consequences in psychoanalysis, from a theoretical, technical and ethical point of view (Boschan, 2011, p. 302).

While in the final phase of the production of the Second Issue, before he had a chance to write his introduction, Dr. Boschan died. The psychoanalytic community is mourning a beloved colleague. We know that he will continue to live in the hearts of his family, friends, patients and his work will lastingly represent him. Daniel Tosso remembers Dr. Boschan in the In Memoriam section at the end of this issue.

Jose Jimenez Avello's paper opens the issue: “With Ferenczi, contemporary psychoanalysis is Other”. Jimenez Avello, from Madrid, describes the essential aspects of Ferenczi's theoretical concepts and their technical and clinical impact on contemporary psychoanalysis. “The Other means not only that we are not the same as decades ago, but that psychoanalysis is much more flexible than the rigid practices to which Ferenczi objected so much. Other means a different understanding of human subjectivity” wrote Dr. Boschan (2011, p. 302).

In “Mutuality: Clinical and Metapsychological Potentials of a Failed Experiment”, Carlos Alberto Castillo Mendoza, also from Madrid, examines the experimentations of Ferenczi with mutual analysis, one of the “temporarily abandoned workings” (Ferenczi, 1929, p. 120) and connects mutuality to the development of the psyche, first in the early relationships and then in the new relationship with the analyst.

Canadian analyst Josette Garon focuses on transgenerational traumas and their disavowal in her clinical paper, “From disavowal and murder to liberty”. Understanding trauma and its impact on the child, and its inevitable presence in the analytic situation, was a life-long pursuit of Ferenczi, who held that a “proper evaluation of the long-neglected traumatogenesis promised to be fruitful, not only for practical therapy but for the theory of our science” (Ferenczi, 1929, p. 122).

Theoretical concepts, such as confusion of tongues, disavowal and progressive trauma, proposed by Ferenczi long became the undeniable part of the psychoanalytic discourse. In their paper, “From Clinical Turmoil to Theoretical articulations”, Eurema Gallo de Moraes and Mônica Medeiros Kather Macedo, analysts from Brazil, bring those seminal Ferenczian concepts to life in their clinical paper.

“The fear of turning into dust: Notes on a group for sexually abused women”, by Carole Beebe Tarantelli, closes this Special Issue. Tarantelli, an analyst working in Rome, has been running a long-term group for childhood sexual abuse survivors, and she elaborates the role of identification with the aggressor, another Ferenczian concept, and how the group helps the members to loosen that identification in the process that Tarantelli calls disidentification with the aggressor.

I want to thank all the participants in this Special Project of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and the Buenos Aires colleagues who made the unforgettable 2009 Conference possible. A big thank you to the members of the Board of the Asociación Cultural Sándor Ferenczi: Liliana Barletta, Mabel Cambero, Beatriz Corti, Oscar A. Elvira, Ana María Giner, Narcisco Notrica, Silvia Raggi, Marcos Tabacznik, Daniel Tosso and Alberto Trimboli. Most importantly, this issue is dedicated to the loving memory of Dr. Pedro J. Boschan, whose input into the work of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, as the International Editorial Board member in Argentina, was invaluable. We will miss him.