Editorial

Important challenges for our psychoanalytic theorisation and the consequences on our clinical work must be addressed nowadays. The clinical practice of couple and family psychoanalysis is very much in need in our contemporary world, many couples seek out psychoanalytic intervention to help them with their conflicts, and many child and adolescent psychoanalysts need psychoanalytic assistance for the family of their patients to contribute to their improvement.

The subject to which most psychoanalysts are fundamentally dedicated is the individual, the internal world, internal objects, conflicts, processes of subjectivation, and the unconscious psychic reality which is its most outstanding constitutive hypothesis. How this knowledge was constituted and the technical modality it acquired gives us the possibility to approach the individual intrapsychic reality by isolating it from other factors. These factors have to do with the intersubjective and trans-subjective spaces with their effects on our internal worlds. Our existence is the effect of this unconscious psychic reality in which other subjects participate, assisting us in the formation of intrapsychic structures, just as we participate in the constitution of the psychic reality of others. The concept of intersubjectivity is imported from other related fields of knowledge: philosophy, linguistics, and French psychoanalysis. This raises a question that we cannot fail to consider. As Freud states in “On narcissism: an introduction” (1914c), we are links in a chain of subjects that precede and succeed us. We are singular subjects that inhabit the plurality of a life full of links: links by which we are constituted. At the same time we are constituents of others through the effect of linkage, of unconscious alliances, and by doing with others. Object relations and identifications are the results of participating in them. We are always participating in intersubjective links between complex organisations. We could define e