This issue continues our celebration of IAPSP’s 42nd conference in Vancouver: Engaging Sameness and Difference: Pathways to Empathic Dialogue. We open the issue with Ranaan Kulka’s Kohut Memorial Lecture. Ranaan proposes the possibility of a “republic of spirit,” one which takes seriously the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and emphasizes the lost notion of fraternity in the French rallying cry of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Ranaan sees in Kohut’s revolutionary theory of the selfobject (without the hyphen) and in Kohut’s insistence on an attitude of “vicarious introspection” a way out of the persistent illusion of self/other dualism, a dangerous illusion that encourages us to approach our fellow humans as separate objects to be exploited just like earth resources at our disposal. All of the subsequent papers in this volume wrestle with ideas of separateness and impermeability – whether absorbed as a cultural myth or taken up as a response to childhood rejection. Gregory Bateson famously said, “It takes two to know one.” From many different directions, these papers move towards a revision of Bateson’s adage: “It takes two to be one.”
Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D.
Guest Editor