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In this issue of our journal, readers can at last find a selection of the main papers presented at the XVth IFPS Forum, which took place in Santiago de Chile between October 15 and 18, 2008 and was dedicated to the theme “Identity and globalisation. New challenges for psychoanalysis.” A detailed report of the major events of the Forum, organised by our member society ICHPA (Sociedad Chilena de Psicoanálisis), attended by more than 500 analysts, candidates and university students, and chaired by Juan Flores, is also printed in this issue. As I write in the report, the long trip to Chile allowed all of us not only to get to know a new and fascinating country, but also to renew our personal contacts with a whole range of foreign colleagues, and to get to know them and, through them, ourselves in an enriching way. Such an experience was further enhanced by the active participation of a whole series of International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) colleagues close to the IFPS, such as Horacio Etchegoyen (the former IPA President, 1993–1997), Janine Puget (Argentina), and Marcelo Viñar and his wife Maren Ulriksen (Uruguay).
The same theme, “Psychoanalysis and globalisation,” had also been the focus of the annual meeting of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), which took place in Munich in May 2008, and some of whose main papers were published in No. 4/2009 of this journal, edited by Michael Ermann. Besides a selection of the German papers, No. 4/2009 also contains the papers given in Munich by Cláudio Eizirik (former IPA president, 2005–2009) and Vamik Volkan, as well as the interview undertaken by Michael Ermann with Carola Mann in Santiago de Chile – where both received the Werner Schwidder Award for their longstanding contribution to the life of the IFPS.
Before developing the main theme of my Editorial – the dialectical nature of the relationship between what I call “global connections” and “international contacts” – let me mention a further series of important e