Editorial

Dear Readers,

This issue's Table of Contents is true to the journal's name: the contributions address and review a number of different clinical and conceptual topics. Some differences diverge. Others intersect and converse.

The notion of conversation takes us back to Vol. 111, No. 2, June 2024, featuring “Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Homelessness” by Deborah Anna Luepnitz and Dennis M. Debiak. Their account of psychoanalytically informed practice with patients unlikely to enter a conventional consulting room in Philadelphia, USA, here receives a response from Lisbon, Portugal. For the group of clinicians and researchers—João Gama-Marques, Elias Barreto, Filipe Arantes-Gonçalves, Guilherme Rui Canta, and Joana Henriques-Calado—inspired by practice of António Bento, MD, homeless-ness is connected with loveless-ness (sem amor, Port.) and unwanted-ness (marontos, Greek). Assisting the homeless citizens of the “fourth world” through a double lens of psychoanalysis and neuropsychiatry, they make an argument for marontology.

Todd Anderson lends a voice to the paradox of secrecy, to a dialectic between secret as a protective inner sanctuary and a prison of isolation; to spaces, secret riverbeds, ranging from the poisonous to the profound. Anderson considers secret to be both an essential component of subjectivity and an underexamined dimension of psychic life, suggesting that bringing together clinical vignettes, psychoanalytic theory, and insights derived from philosophy enables the exploration of silences, narratives, and somatic expressions. A field born from the revelation of (sexual) secrets, psychoanalysis re-enters as an ethical stance. It respects and awaits rather than pathologizes: “the task of psychoanalytic understanding is not to eradicate secrecy, but to discern its role in each individual's psychic economy,” thus fostering the possibility of relational contact and psychic transformation.

One way of continuing to read would be to hold in mind the link betw