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The IFPS Forum held in New York City in May 2016, about which one of us wrote a very detailed report (see Conci, 2017), was so successful that, for the first time in the history of our journal, we are able to publish a third monographic issue centering around the papers presented there. Part I and Part II came out in Volume 26 (2017) as Issues 3 and 4 having as guest editors Valerie Tate Angel, Edith Gould and Ona Lindquist. Publishing a third issue means that not only the plenary papers but also many of the individual papers presented in New York, almost three years ago, were very interesting and raised issues worth fathoming and discussing. For this we have to thank not only the authors, but also the guest editors and organizers of the Forum. Of course the number of interesting papers produced also shows the importance of terror and terrorism as main features of today’s collective psychic landscape.
The fist article of this issue is “Terrorism and the practice of angst” by Anna Maria Loiacono (Florence). After elaborating her opinion that “violence generates terror, and terror generates terrorism”, the Author distinguishes between “violence from the top” and “violence from the bottom” and hints at the “clash of powers” present in the social and political environment. She concludes her paper with the clinical example of a group therapy session taking place after the Paris terrorist attack of November 13, 2015, which allows her to show us how we as therapists can remain imprisoned in the dissociative dynamics of our patients, as they are activated by violence and terrorism.
The aim of the article “Descendants of terror”, by Grigoris Maniadakis (Athens), is to deal with the transgenerational transmission of the traumatic experience of terror in the large group, in the light of Vamik Volkan’s concept of “chosen trauma”, which shows how specific mental representations of a traumatizing historical event, shared by the large group, can be transmitted to descendants – and e