Psychoanalytic dialogues

Psychoanalytic Dialogues. A Journal of Relational Perspectives, the journal founded by Stephen Mitchell (1946-2000) in 1991, represents one of his major and lasting legacies. Having personally known him well, I know how much a dialogical perspective meant to him and how much it characterized his work. I had met him in Florence in April 1988 at what later became the Florence Sullivan Institute, where he had been invited with Jay Greenberg, given the success of the Italian edition (1986) of their Object relations in psychoanalytic theories (1983). Having helped in the translation into Italian of his workshop, I had the chance to share with Mitchell my interest for Sullivan's work and he encouraged me to write a book on him. This is how our relationship started, and through it I not only ended up publishing Sullivan rivisitato (2000), but I also helped him have his books published in Italy, starting with the 1993 Italian edition of Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration (1988). In April 1991 I organized a second trip to Italy for him - with papers in Rome, Milan and Bologna - and I remember him bringing me a copy of the first issue of Dialogues ; in April 1996 we were together back in Florence, where he presented the paper on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis which became one of the central chapters of Autonomy and influence in psychoanalysis (1997). Having become a member of the editorial board of this journal (at the Florence Forum, May 1994), I had the chance to get Mitchell involved in the small workshop which the editorial board of IFP organized in New York City at the beginning of January 1996, in which Jan Stensson, our founding editor, formulated the editorial philosophy which we have been following ever since (see Conci, 1996).

But here is the incipit of the “Editorial philosophy” which Mitchell formulated in the first issue of Dialogues: “There is a great irony at the heart of contemporary psychoanalysis. The skilled psychoanalyst as clin