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Discussing with each other the contents of this issue brought to our minds some important thoughts of Freud and Bion, which have always been very important for us – for the ways in which we look at psychoanalysis and try to promote it through this journal. We are referring here to Freud’s emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of psychoanalysis, and on the necessity of keeping developing it in the direction of a “normal science,” as opposed to limiting it to its clinical and therapeutic aspects. From this perspective can be seen the whole development of his work, as well as its contemporary relevance. The full articulation of this point of view can, for example, be found in his 1926 book The question of lay analysis (Freud, 1926).
Another fundamental author who came to our mind is Wilfred Bion, with his concept of psychoanalysis as a research work centered around opening up and reaching out to new points of view, new perspectives, and new fields. Such a stance already informed the clinical work he undertook in 1943 with John Rickman (1891–1951) as an army psychiatrist (Conci, 2011).
Although we both believe that psychic life begins and evolves properly through the bodily and psychological contacts that establish themselves between the baby and the mother, we felt that Samuel Juni’s revisitation of Freud’s one-body metapsychology deserved to be presented to our readers. An emeritus professor of applied psychology at New York University, Juni has already published a paper in our journal – “Conceptualization of hostile psychopathy and sadism: Drive theory and object relations perspective” (2009). In the challenging and original article that we now propose to our readers, with the title “Toward a unified field theory of libido and aggression: Introducing Delta as the singular id dynamic in drive theory,” the author revisits Freud’s tension-reduction model and reformulates it in terms of a unitary direction-independent foundational id drive toward tension-level change in