20 years of neuropsychoanalysis

This is quite a celebratory issue. Because this journal was founded in 1999, and the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society held its 20th Congress this year, we thought this year is a suitable time to celebrate two decades of neuropsychoanalysis.

These twenty years have been full of exciting meetings around the world, and an explosion of publications connecting the brain with psychoanalytic concepts – many of which have appeared in these pages. It has been a time of new ideas and of re-evaluating long-standing ones, sometimes supporting those older ideas in surprising ways, and sometimes updating or discarding them. Moreover, on a social level, this has been a time of developing important connections between disciplines that had been separated for decades, and deepening collaboration between colleagues around the world.

The celebration was kicked off in our last issue, which featured an interview of Oliver Turnbull by Christian Salas (Salas & Palmer-Cancel, 2019), where Oliver and Christian discussed a number of central ideas that have emerged in the neuropsychoanalysis community. In this issue, we expand on that foundation, with a series of invited personal essays from members of the community who have been involved with our interdisciplinary project in various ways, both individuals and coordinators of our vibrant regional groups.

In our Society Proceedings section, we invited our contributors to reflect on several questions: How has neuropsychoanalysis affected your members’ practice, thinking, or social/personal life? What has changed in the world of psychoanalysis, or in neuroscience, since the journal's founding in 1999? Has neuropsychoanalysis played any role in those changes? What are some key contributions made by our interdisciplinary dialogue to date? What issues are now ripe for exploration? Have we made any wrong turns or mistakes that need to be corrected?

Without any coordination between them, our contributors ended up distributing the answers amongst