In These Pages…

This Special Issue of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, dedicated to Charles Rycroft, aims to offer our readers thoughts both on the origins and vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic vocation, and on the nature and development of the identity of the psychoanalyst. The psychoanalytic vocation and the identity of the psychoanalyst are, after all, the central themes of Rycroft's paper, “Why Analysts Need Their Patients' Transferences”, originally published in 1993, which opens this Special Issue and also acts as a shared thread running through the reflections of the colleagues invited to make their contributions.

“What makes certain people aspire to become psychoanalysts?” and “Why do some of those who become psychoanalysts succeed in acquiring their own personal voice, while others have to relinquish theirs in favour of other people's who are considered more powerful and authoritative?” are substantially two of the questions that the papers presented here try to answer. All these papers examine from several angles the psychological and institutional factors that are involved in the process of professional growth of those aspiring to become psychoanalysts and also, resulting from this aspiration, the various forms of introjection depending on the psychoanalytic environments that the analyst has frequented and where he or she has trained.

Another of the main issues addressed in these pages concerns the problem of what constitutes “dissidence” and “dissent” in psychoanalysis (Haynal, 2001) and, in particular, the question of whether it is inevitable that every analyst becomes a “dissident” when he or she reaches complete maturity in training, no longer feeling the need to “hunt with the pack” (Freud, 1921, p. 85), a need that we know inevitably characterises the first periods of growth. It is a fact of life that psychoanalysis has evolved (and continues to do so) overtime and that the generations that followed Freud experienced it and conceived it in a way that was at l