Editor’s Note

As Joseph Sandler (1983) observed many years ago, the continued vitality of psychoanalysis as a discipline rests on our ongoing effort to interrogate and find new life in theoretical ideas as we confront the inevitable caesura separating public theory and intuitive, private understanding. This issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly features five original papers that each, in their own way, exemplify the spirit of finding something new, and newly alive, amidst the long-familiar in the writings of Bion, Loewald, and Winnicott.

Joseph Aguayo’s paper, “W.R. Bion’s Case of the Imaginary Twin: An Implicit Model of Clinical Inquiry” revisits Bion’s 1950 membership paper to the British Psychoanalytic Society in order to make a case for this paper as an underappreciated classic that, in camouflaged form, demonstrated (already) the essential elements of Bion’s distinctive psychoanalytic approach. Aguayo approaches this paper first from a political and historical perspective, highlighting some of the possible reasons for various forms of camouflage or disguise that may have prevented prior readers from recognizing its significance. Aguayo then distills from this text what he and his research group have dubbed as Bion’s Implicit Method of Clinical Inquiry, the essence of his clinical psychoanalytic technique.

Jones De Luca’s “Loewald: Density and Its Clinical Application” presents an application of Loewald’s ideas in an Italian context, specifically Loewald’s concept of density, in which emotions and meanings are deeply connected but not yet differentiated. De Luca’s sensitively rendered clinical example distills this aspect of Loewald’s vision and reveals its utility in “loosen the analyst’s subjectivity…to engage in a more or less guided search for a kind of unison between patient and analyst, and to make contact with something primordial or difficult to define, akin to Bion’s concept of ‘O’” (p. 41). Through the poetry of this paper, De

Luca demonstrates the process by which “