FRONTLINE—On the Evolution of Psychodynamic Practice

Orchestrating this special issue has been a fascinating experience. For the past 25 years the two editors have been professionally linked. Their relationship started in a classroom setting when Silvia W. Olarte was a teacher and César A. Alfonso a second year psychiatric resident in New York City. The relationship evolved from teacher and student, to supervisor and supervisee, to training analyst and candidate supervisee, to later colleagues as attending psychiatrists working in the same hospital, to finally training analysts in the same psychoanalytic institute. In the process they became professional collaborators and dear friends. Both have experienced, in the span of the last three decades, the changes that any psychoanalyst practicing psychoanalysis during this period has lived through. Both consider The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry their “professional home.” It has been in this Academy that both have nurtured their continuous questioning and challenging of the “standard” theoretical and practice parameters of the psychoanalytic profession. When our Editor-in-Chief approached SWO asking her to guest edit this special issue on “Contemporary Practice of Dynamic Psychiatry,” to co-edit it with CAA was the logical fit.

The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, true to its original objectives, has consistently been since its inception a forum for the exchange of new ideas in the context of a collegial and rigorous scientific environment. Our fellow members and psychoanalysts are conscientious in their practices and courageous in questioning