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The year 2020 will go down in human history as the year of the Coronavirus, whose multiple, severe, tragic, and revolutionary (hopefully not all bad) consequences we are not yet able – as I write this at the beginning of April – to evaluate. Through this issue of the journal, I want to propose to the reader a series of papers dealing with both our clinical work and the research work going on in psychoanalysis at the beginning of this new decade. As we will see, it is important for both dimensions to be at the same time pursued separately yet influence and enrich each other.
A good demonstration of how our clinical work has to be constantly revisited and enriched through new points of view is represented by the article written by Isabelle Boulze-Launey and Alain Rigaud (Montpellier, France), “Alcohol and loneliness: In my solitude.” The authors revisit the psychopathology of alcoholic patients in the light of the clinical research work done by Jean Rainaut (1919–2009), which allowed him to catch these patients’ sense of isolation, and their early feeling of insecurity, close to that experienced in psychosis. This is the basis of the authors’ new psychotherapeutic approach to such a difficult category of patients, based on an attempt to help them establish a new relationship with themselves, along the line of what Donald Winnicott has called “the capacity to be alone.” What the authors call “the solitude of the alcoholic subject” and the “psychopathology of isolation” from which these patients suffer was for many decades a very hard challenge to address for any psychiatrist and any psychiatric institution, and it is a great relief to know that they can benefit from this new analytically oriented approach, based upon “a reactivation of the paternal function.”
The second paper in this issue, “A psychoanalytic interpretation of bipolar disorder,” by Giancarlo Ventimiglia (Pisa, Italy), is also the result of a systematic work of clinical research whose previous stages have