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The 2024 Forum of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) took place in Bergamo (Italy) in October 2024 under the title “Psychoanalysis faces the challenges of postmodern society: New settings, models and perspectives to navigate complexity.” We have already produced a monographic issue, Issue 4/2025, with the title “Our candidates and their papers – Past, present and future,” centered around the papers given in Bergamo by six of the candidates who had run for the Gaetano Benedetti Candidate Award, and accompanied by an introductory Editorial (Conci and Cassullo, 2025). These six candidates were Francesca Guma, Adriana Dell’Arte, Riccardo Scattolini, Chiara Soligo, Andrea Zenari, and Mariagiovanna Cozza. In the same issue, readers can also find a very detailed Report of the entire forum written by one of us (Conci, 2025). In the meantime, the journal’s editorial board worked on the papers we had received from a whole series of participants, arriving at the selection we are now proposing to the readers of this issue. We are very thankful to all the authors for agreeing to modify their papers according to the feedback that arose from the peer review process, and for having produced their final versions.
We start our selection with the paper by Per-Einar Binder (Bergen, Norway), entitled “Striving to conceal: Perfectionism as a shield against existential vulnerability,” a paper that has undergone almost 3000 downloads since its online publication in October 2025. A professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, the author has been a very precious member of our editorial board for almost 20 years, with particular regard not only for his scientific background, but also for his clinical sensibility and his good contact with the younger generations of psychology students. These are in fact also the main ingredients of his paper, one of the prompts behind it being the marked rise of perfectionism among young people as a defense against existenti