From the Editor

Reading is a risky business. It involves a meeting with the unknown, and the meeting can evoke numerous and divergent feelings, some co-existing, as if making a mockery of our ability to shape an opinion. These feelings are at times cold and lifeless, and at other times, if we are fortunate, exciting and passionate. We feel a sense of gratitude toward the writer for finding a place in us, perhaps a memory, that has never been quite articulated in the way we have just read.

John Berger says about painting, “… when a painting is lifeless it is the result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a collaboration to start.”1 We take this risk in reading anything from a novel to a short psychological paper. We have to get in close with the words, to let them have an effect upon us, so that a collaboration can begin. In that collaboration, the sensitivities and sensibilities of both writer and reader collide, in the same way that analyst and patient meet (collide) in the consulting room. Sometimes in the reading, we are annoyed and frustrated with the writer and give up on the words; at other times we are carried, feeling met and spoken to. More often than not, our collaborations are a mutual affair — the writer adding to our world while we simultaneously fill in the blanks and correct the words and passages that fail — and all the while, almost imperceptibly, a new collaboration has begun! As Italo Calvino noted, “Reading means approaching something that is just coming into being.”2

In our current issue of fort da, we hope to have started that collaboration in our varied collection of articles. We have an as of yet unpublished article by Dr. Michael Eigen, on the very issue of sensitivity, that speaks to one's tenderness and rawness, not just from the perspective of our patients, who often feel both touched roughly and caressed carefully, but also from the perspective of us as readers. From Dr. Roberto Oelsner, we have a “postmortem” of an analysis, one p