Preface

As our loyal readers will be aware, since becoming editor of American Imago in the Fall of 2001, I have sought to give every issue a thematic focus by bringing together papers that all address a common topic. To the extent that I have succeeded in this aim, I hope others will agree that each of the past twenty issues has indeed been a “special issue,” though I hasten to remind prospective contributors that a preponderance of our articles are unsolicited, and only the Fall issue, which always has a guest editor, consists entirely of commissioned pieces.

Having completed five years chained to the masthead, perhaps I may be forgiven for adapting George Orwell's words in Animal Farm and confessing that, while all issues of American Imago are special, some issues are more special than others. And none of my love-children is closer to my heart than “Notable Encounters.”

Never before have I appropriated the title of a single article for an entire issue. That I have done so in this instance attests to the importance I attach to our lead essay byJ.-B. Pontalis. Presented last November to the British Psychoanalytical Society, “Notable Encounters” is Pontalis's lyrical tribute to the people who have made him the analyst he is “still trying to become” today. Pontalis begins by reflecting on how the British Society has served as “a key point of reference” for French analysts and on the history of exchanges (not without moments of tragicomic misunderstanding) that have taken place between analysts “from both sides of the Channel—this waterway that both divides and links us.” Among other anecdotes, Pontalis, ruefully recognizing that he is best known in the English-speaking world as the coauthor of The Language of Psychoanalysis, regales his audience with the story of the prospective patient who confused him with Jean Laplanche!

The three “notable encounters” that have been formative in Pontalis's professional development were with Sartre, Lacan,