You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At the last Forum of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) held in October 2024 in Bergamo (Italy), under the title “Psychoanalysis faces the challenges of postmodern society: New settings, models and perspectives to navigate complexity,” more than a hundred papers were given by the more than 350 participants, including an unprecedented number of papers given by candidates. Five of these latter papers were honored with the Benedetti-Conci Candidate Award. This is also why a very articulate report about the forum was written by one of us (MC) and published in this issue. The first edition of the Award took place at the Kaunas (Lithuania) Forum of September 2014, but its origin goes back to the IFPS Scientific Conference which took place in Stockholm in August 1991. We have been systematically publishing the award-winning papers in our journal, but only this issue specifically centers around them, a monographic issue, to which we will introduce our readers.
But let us first deal with the origins of the Candidate Award! One of us (MC) received it in Stockholm in August 1991, where Jan Stensson (1935–2024) and his Swedish society organized a conference under the title “Male and female themes in psychoanalysis.” The award had been finananced by Tess Forrest, the widow of the W.A. White analyst Joseph Barnett (1926–1988), and was named after him. The paper was entitled “Male and female themes in the young Freud’s letters to Eduard Silberstein – Early traces of some psychoanalytic concepts,” and it ended up being published in the very first issue of this journal (1992). In the spring of 1991 Conci had been the editor of the Italian edition of this collection of letters, and he could show how they can allow a better understanding of the internal world of the adolescent Freud as one of the major sources of his later discovery of psychoanalysis. This event ended up being such an important turning point for the award-winning candidate as to allow him,