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The papers we have put together in this issue represent the selection that our Editorial Board made of the many papers presented at the XXIst IFPS Forum held in Lisbon on February 5-8, 2020, about which one of us wrote the report published in No. 2 of Vol. 29 of this journal (Conci, 2020). Writing now, with the pandemics not fully behind us and the war in the Ukraine accompanying our daily life, we can only hope to be lucky enough to be able to meet next October 19-22 in Madrid, for the XXIInd IFPS Forum, organized by the Centro Psicoanalìtico de Madrid under the title “Psychoanalytic Theories and Techniques: Dialogue, Difficulties and Future. 60th Anniversary of the IFPS.” Of the eight papers of this issue, three come from Portugal, three from the USA, Brazil and Italy, and the last two - which were not presented in Lisbon - from Iran and from Israel.
One of the best and most appreciated papers given in Lisbon was Sandra Buechler’s paper “King Lear and the challenge of retirement,” dealing as it does with a question that most of us experience as rather embarrassing, problematic, if not wholly impossible to deal with. But Sandra was courageous enough to be able to draw a line and retire from working with patients, on May 31, 2019 - the day before she turned 73. This allowed her to formulate a series of thoughtful considerations on how such a decision impacts our personal identity, and on how we can survive living without the structuring - and reassuring - routine of our analytic work. Of course, Sandra was helped in such a difficult transition by her passion for writing, which allowed her to publish her seventh book, Poetic dialogues, in the fall of 2021 (Buechler, 2021). Her first book, Clinical values: Emotions that guide psychoanalytic treatment (Buechler, 2004), was reviewed by one of us in this journal (Conci, 2006). Sandra Buechler is not only one of the most productive colleagues of the W.A. White Institute of her generation, but also the one who has most acti