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These special issues of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis are a compilation of selected papers presented at the XVIth International Forum of Psychoanalysis, a congress of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) held in Athens, Greece, on 20–23 October 2010. The main subject of the congress was “The Intrapsychic and the Intrasubjective in Contemporary Psychoanalysis”, which is also the title for the special IFP issues. The organizing agent and hosting society of the congress was the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (HSPP).
A glance at the collected abstracts from the Congress shows just how many papers were presented over those four days. Our selection was made very carefully, in full awareness that many excellent papers would have to be omitted due to constraints of space in the journal. As guest editors we strove to focus our attention more on clinical psychoanalytical texts and texts with an impact on clinical practice, partly because this better represented the climate of the congress and partly because it expresses the orientation of the HSPP, to which we belong. The opinions, sometimes highly original, expressed in the texts are those of the authors, and criticism of the papers is left to the reader.
The thinking behind the choice of theme for the congress was that in the dawn of the second century of psychoanalysis it became apparent that diverse theoretical movements had been developed: from impulse gratification to the search for the object, and from “impulse and object” to the interplay of the two subjects; from a narcissistic and object relation towards the search for the true self, in the intrapsychic realm, and to the genuine quest of the other beyond projective and identificatory mechanisms, in the interpersonal realm.
Although analysis of the phenomena of the intrapsychic space, e.g. conflicts, pathological object relations, etc., remains the quintessence of psychoanalytic theory and practice, other complem