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I had never been to Lithuania before I went there a year and a half ago, to participate in the XVIIIth IFPS Forum. When I came back, I was so happy with the series of excellent initiatives that I had experienced in Kaunas that I felt I needed to write about them and the Forum without waiting for publication of the selected papers around which this issue is centered. And that is what I did, in the Editorial of Issue 4/2014, under the title “Accompanying our members, our readers and our patients in their evolution and development” (Conci, 2014b).
I underlined there how almost 200 participants from 24 countries meeting to discuss the topic of the Forum – “Psychoanalysis, trauma and severe mental disorders” – were able to develop the kind of close and personal international exchange that our Federation and this journal stand for. We heard not only several good papers on the conference’s topic, but also about the first steps of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Cuba; we were party to the first scientific meeting of the Individual Members Section, chaired by Michael Ermann; we enjoyed a very good panel organized by this journal’s editorial board and chaired by Christer Sjödin; and we witnessed the presentation of a series of papers from which the two ex aequo winners of the Benedetti–Conci Candidates Award were chosen. Today, we are able to publish a selection of five papers dealing with the conference’s main theme, four papers given at the panel on “Writing, evaluating and publishing psychoanalytic papers,” and the two award-winning papers. Our aim is for this issue to be distributed at our next Forum, to be held in New York City on May 9–12, 2016, with the topic “Violence, terror and terrorism today. Psychoanalytic perspectives.”
Let us start with the paper “Psychoanalysis with the traumatized patient: Helping to survive extreme experience and complicated loss,” by Sverre Varvin (Oslo). One of Scandinavia’s best-known analysts, Varvin has worked for many years on the psycho