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This Special Issue allows us to get a picture of innovative aspects of the work with traumatized patients and the theory of trauma. The papers in this Special Issue are further selections from the presentations of the 8th International Sándor Ferenczi Conference, “Faces of Trauma,” which took place in Budapest from May 31 to June 3, 2012, organized by Judit Mészáros, the President of the Sándor Ferenczi Society, and her team (see also Haynal, 2012).
Since Freud's (1939) Moses paper, psychoanalysis is more and more sensitive to the dimension of traumatism. Also, the millions traumatized, including so many psychoanalysts, by the events of the Second World War (Holocaust, military actions, forced migrations, and so on), contributed meaningfully to this sensitivity in the analysts' offices. The British Middle Group (Independents) contributed importantly to this awareness, developing the notion of cumulative traumas. In the cultural environment of analysis, new psychiatric diagnostics, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the notion of stress in medicine contributed to changes in theoretical views. The rediscovery of Ferenczi's ideas and a better understanding of our polyphonic history went in the same direction. Nowadays, many analysts join Ferenczi in believing that trauma is a basic notion to understand man's struggle with his fate.
What is traumatism? It is an experience that cannot be overcome by the strength of the ego, neither in the moment it happens nor afterwards. Let us be reminded that the deepest human desire is that good experiences should be endless, without interruption. While the highest religious promise is eternity, life is full of changes in a continuous process. One central aspect of traumatism is tied to its producing a brutal discontinuity. Life begins with the discontinuity of intrauterine existence interrupted by birth, then followed by