Editorial Introduction

This issue opens with Amanda Kottler’s Kohut Memorial Lecture, which she gave in Pasadena. It is a treasure. Next, we have a remarkable set of papers from our Global Advisory Committee which were presented in earlier forms in Rome. Each presents how psychoanalysis and/or self psychology is faring in their countries. Gudrun Prinz introduces this set of papers and Liling Li summarizes them. We have papers from China (Xin Li), Japan, (Koichi Togashi), Turkey (Sibel Mercan), Israel (Karina Goldberg), and Austria (Gudrun Prinz). Reading them together feels like taking an exceptional psychoanalytic journey through (for some of us) foreign lands.

Ilene Philipson’s provocative address, “Have We Lost Our Love for Psychoanalysis?”, which received a sustained standing ovation in Pasadena, is next and is coupled with an equally provocative discussion by Barry Magid.

The issue then proceeds with four research articles exploring unusual therapeutic situations and/or challenges to existing theory. Christina Peters’ article explores how neuropsychological differences shape experience and how self psychology can relate to such divergences. In a timely essay, David Kitron discusses the vicissitudes of empathy in the face of partisanship, conflict and social upheaval. Todd Frugia presents a case in which his patient’s negative selfobject interactions have both pathological and beneficial effects and shows how, through dreamwork, exploring these experiences the therapist receives a gift of healing. Todd Anderson’s article asks whether we need to go beyond the ethic of mutual recognition that is prevalent in relational theory and accept unbridgeable gaps in the treatment rather than foreclosing them through premature repair.

This issue concludes with some delightful poems, stories, and literary analyses in our Cultural Perspectives section, introduced by Sandy Hershberg. John Campbell analyzes an unusual John Cheever short story from the viewpoint of self psychology. Donna DiCello and Nanc