In These Pages…

Supported by The International Team of Ivan Ward, Ferenc Eros & Anna Kovács and Tom Keve.

In our First Special Issue we spoke about our London Conference: Sincerity and Freedom in 2013 (Szekacs-Weisz, 2014). Papers presented there were inspired by Ferenczi's Clinical Diary and celebrated the centenary of the foundation of both the British and the Hungarian Societies—thus paying homage to the first 100 years of psychoanalysis.

Looking back at the turn of the last century, the time when psychoanalysis was born, from the very first decades of this millennium is an intellectual and emotional challenge, but it makes developmental tendencies visible. It also helps to ask questions and think about connections that are essential in making sense of our present and future. Perceiving these linkages also provide a chance of understanding what has been lost through the dramatic and traumatic experiences of the 20th century. We can see how new ideas became an integral part of the formative changes. They altered the face of the city, the interiors of public and private spaces, and the view of the world.

The quest for going beyond the surface that conceals the essential nature of things and to discover the world in its complex and confusing disharmonies and consonances became the challenge of those years. Experimenting with new modes of symbol formation and representation was being seen as part of this process. The new inquiry into the nature of the external and internal world is channeled through the prism of relatedness. In the psychoanalytic space meaning is created by the analytical couple together: the patient and the analyst are part of the internal experience and the interpretation of it. The creative process becomes a shared venture. All these factors cause mutative changes in our basic concepts regarding subject and object, body and mind, cause and effect, fact and fiction.