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We believe that an important aspect of psychoanalysis, first in its clinical dimension, consists of identifying and creating interactions and links, while being itself influenced by this very process. Freud’s connections between symptom, dream, joke, parapraxis, and transference are an example of this (Miller, 2015). Bion’s concepts of linking and containing provide an intersubjective model of such interactions, while Winnicott’s potential space (or intermediate area) defines an area where such phenomena, transference and countertransference included, can take place.
A psychoanalytic journal can be conceived as a space where authors and readers, as members of the psychoanalytic community, interact through their request to be informed, to learn, and to be represented. This puts the journal in the position of a container not only of these interactions, but also of the links and interactions that the papers published in it aim to explore (Maniadakis, 2016). The clinical encounter can be rightly considered as a “royal road” for such an exploration.
In this issue, the first two articles come from a panel on the work of one of the most outstanding figures in clinical psychoanalysis – Harry Stack Sullivan. At the 49th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) held in Boston, MA, at the end of July 2015, one of us (M.C.) was able to organize a panel on “The relevance of Harry Stack Sullivan’s (1892–1949) work for contemporary psychoanalysis,” in connection with the eventual acceptance of the William Alanson White Society as member society of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations. We do not know whether Sullivan would have been happy about this, but we know that his work and his legacy belong to psychoanalysis as a scientific and professional discipline. As Marco Conci showed in Sullivan revisited – Life and work, Sullivan was a psychoanalyst and remained one until the end of his life, although he preferred to speak of himself as “a so