Sergio Benvenuto is a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, and a contributor to cultural journals such as Differentia (New York), aut aut (Milan), Lettre Internationale (French, German, Spanish, Hungarian and Italian editions), Transeuropéennes (Paris), Anamorphosis (San Francisco). He translated into Italian Jacques Lacan's Séminaire XX. Encore, as well as works by Françoise Dolto, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and others. His books include La strategia freudiana (Naples: Liguori, 1984); with Oscar Nicolaus, La bottega dell'anima (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990), Capire l'America (Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1995), Dicerie e pettegolezzi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), Un cannibale alla nostra mensa (Bari: Dedalo, 2000). [benvenuto.jep@mclink.it]

Tullio Carere-Comes, M.D., has experienced the teaching of different psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic schools since the years of his psychiatric residency. He was interested in the unique perspectives offered by the different schools, but rejected the dogmatism and sectarianism of most of them. He therefore negotiated every step of his training outside the institutional programs with trainers of different persuasions. Since the beginning of his career as a professional and as a researcher, his main interest has been the study of the field as a whole, of which the individual psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic schools have each explored only a limited sector. His attempts to draw a map of the field range from Principi di terapia psichiatrica (Milan: Cortina, 1974), to "Beyond psychotherapy: Dialectical therapy" (Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 1999). He is the Coordinator of the SEPI network in Italy (Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration) and a founding member of ARPE (Association for Research on Psychoanalysis in Europe). [tucarere@tin.it]

Elvio Fachinelli (1928-1989) was an M.D. and psychoanalyst in Milan where, in the 1970's, he established the journal L'erba voglio. He published his witty "psycho-political" articles there and in the popular weekly L'Espresso, establishing a strong connection between psychoanalysis and the emancipation movements of the time. Although he remained a member of the official IPA Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), in 1969 he led a public protest against the Italian psychoanalytic establishment, which he criticized for its conservative sclerosis. He authored the books: L'erba voglio, with Luisa Muraro and Giuseppe Sartori (Turin: Einaudi, 1971); Il bambino dalle uova d'oro (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974); La freccia ferma (Milan: L'Erba Voglio, 1979); Claustrofilia (Milan: Adelphi, 1983); La mente estatica (Milan: Adelphi, 1989).

Judith Feher-Gurewich was born in 1949, she is a practicing psychoanalyst in Cambridge MA, and the director of the "Lacan Seminar" at Center for the Humanities at Harvard Unversity. She is a member of "Espace Analytique" Association de Formation Psychanalytique et de Recherches Freudiennes (Paris) and an affiliated Member of Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Inc. She is the editor with Michel Tort of Lacan and the New Wave of American Psychoanalyisis (New York: Other Press, 1996). She has written numerous articles, both in English and French, on the relation between psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory and the social sciences.

Michel Henry is one of the most famous phenomenological philosophers in France. He was Professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier. He is the author of many philosophical essays, such as: L'essence de la manifestation (Paris: P.U.F. 1963), 2 voll.; Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps. Essai sur l'ontologie biranienne (Paris: P.U.F. 1965); Marx. Une philosophie de la réalité (Paris: Gallimard 1976); Marx. Une philosophie de l'économie (Paris: Gallimard 1976); Généalogie de la psychanalyse (Paris: P.U.F. 1985); Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil 2000). He was also the author of some novels, such as: L'amour les yeux (Paris: Gallimard 1976), winner of the Prix Renaudot; Le fils du roi (Paris: Gallimard 1981).

Horst Kaechele, M.D., born in 1944, was raised in Stuttgart. He studied medicine in Marburg, Leeds (England) and Munich. He was trained in psychotherapy at the Ulm University and in psychoanalysis at the Ulm Institute of Psychoanalysis (IPA). He has been Associate professor at Ulm University since 1977, and he is currently head of the section for psychoanalytic methodology at Ulm University, head of the Center for Psychotherapy Research in Stuttgart, and holds a chair of psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine at the Faculty of Medicine at Ulm University. He is visiting professor at University College, London. His research has mainly been on the psychoanalytic process; on computer based text analysis and the development of the Ulm Textbank (with E Mergenthaler); on transference and on the theme of core conflictual relationship; on dose-effect relations in in-patient psychotherapy, and on perinatal psychosomatics.
Among his recent publications in English: with H. Kordy and M. Richard, "Therapy amount and outcome of inpatient psychodynamic treatment of eating disorders in Germany: Data from a multicenter study", Psychotherapy Research, 2001, 11, pp. 239-257; with A Buchheim, G Schmücker, KH Brisch, "Development, Attachment and Relationship: New Psychoanalytic Concepts" in FA Henn, N. Sartorius, H. Helmchen, H. Lauter, eds., Contemporary Psychiatry (Berlin: Springer, 2001), pp. 358-370; with V Tschuschke, B Hertenstein, R Arnold, D Bunjes, R Denzinger, "Assocations between coping and survival time of adult leukemia patients receiving allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. Results of a prospective study", Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 2001, 50, pp. 277-285. Among his books in English: Psychoanalytic Practice. vol.1: Principles (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo: Springer, 1987)(softcover reprint: New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1994); Psychoanalytic Practice, vol.2: Clinical Studies (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo: Springer, 1991)(softcover reprint: New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1994) [kaechele@sipsy.medizin.uni-ulm.de].

Otto Kernberg, M.D., is the Medical Director of The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, Westchester Division. He also teaches psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College and at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Among his works: Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975); Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (New York: Jason Aronson, 1976); Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory Applied.(New York: Jason Aronson, 1980); Internal World and External Reality., New York: Jason Aronson, 1980); Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies (New Haven-London: Yale Univ. Press, 1984); Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Love relations. Normality and Pathology (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995); "A concerned critique of psychoanalytic education", Int. J. Psychoanal., 2000, 81, pp. 97-120.

Adrian O. Johnston is currently a lecturer in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, as well as being a post-doctoral member of the Collegium Philosophiae Transatlanticum. His published articles address psychoanalysis, contemporary continental theory, and the history of European philosophy. His recently defended dissertation, entitled Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (written under the dual direction of Edward S. Casey and Slavoj _i_ek), reassesses the psychoanalytic theory of Trieb through an examination of various philosophical approaches to the problem of temporality and the bearing these approaches have for an understanding of the workings of the libidinal economy. He has also just finished a second book-length manuscript on freedom, determinism, and ethics in psychoanalysis and philosophy. [ajohnsto@ic.sunysb.edu]

Giampaolo Lai is a psychoanalyst, Associated Member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society. He has worked at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Lausanne, where he followed a classical Freudian training. In his psychoanalytic researches he has inserted the philosophy of language in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis (see Le parole del primo colloquio, 1976; Un sogno di Freud, 1977; Due errori di Freud, 1978, all three published by Boringhieri, Turin). He has privileged the ethical over the cognitive aspect, substituting the search for happiness to the research of truth (see La conversazione felice, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1985). He has studied the loss of identity and the dissolution of the psychological Ego (cf. Disidentità, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988). He has elaborated a conceptual and practical design, Conversationalism (Conversazionalismo), which revolves around three key words: material conversations, immaterial conversation, adventures of the grammatical subject (see Conversazionalismo, 1993; La conversazione immateriale, 1995; both published by Bollati-Boringhieri, Turin). He is a Professor at the School for Specialization in Psychotherapy at the State University of Milan. He is the President of the research group Accademia delle tecniche conversazionali and the editor of the journal Tecniche conversazionali. [Via Giulini 6 - 20123 Milano, Italy; plavanc@tin.it]

Raul Moncayo was born in Chile and received psychoanalytic training in Buenos Aires. He obtained a Ph.D. in Social-Clinical Psychology in the tradition of the Frankfurt School at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. Analyst of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in Berkeley. Clinical and Training Director of Mission Mental Health, San Francisco. Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology and Practice Leader and Zen Priest at the Berkeley Zen Center. He has published several papers in the areas of psychoanalysis and Buddhism. [Raul_Moncayo@dph.sf.ca.us]

Jean-Luc Nancy teaches philosophy at the University of Strasburg and previously of San Diego (Calif.). Among his works: with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Le titre de la lettre. Une lecture de Lacan (Paris: Galilée, 1972); with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L'Absolu littéraire (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978); La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: 1986, 2001); L'expérience de la liberté (Paris: Galilée, 1988); Etre singulier pluriel (Paris: 1996); Hegel, L'inquiétude du négatif (Paris: 1997); Le regard du portrait (Paris: Galilée, 2000); L'"il y a" du rapport sexuel (Paris: Galilée, 2001).
Among his works translated in English: The Literary Absolute, with Ph.Lacoue-Labarthe (SUNY Press, 1987); Unworking Community (Minnesota Press, 1991); The weight of thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1998); The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); The Muses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); The Sense of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); The Speculative Remark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); "Finite history", The States of theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); "Preface" and co-edition of Who comes after the subject? (New York & London: Routledge, 1991); "Elliptical sense", Derrida : a critical reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); "The Deleuzian Fold of Thought", Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); "The deconstruction of Christianity", Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). On his thought: Simon Sparks, ed., The Sense of Philosophy: on Jean-Luc Nancy (New York & London: Routledge, 1996) [Jean-Luc.Nancy@wanadoo.fr]

Diego Napolitani, M.D., was a member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (IPA) from 1963 until he left it in 1999. He founded and directed the first "therapeutic communities" for psychotic patients in Italy, inspired by therapeutic communities directed by Maxwell Jones at Melrose Hospital in Scotland, and Thomas Main at Cassel Hospital in London. This experience led him to an ever greater interest in group analysis, and in historicist-relational psychoanalysis. He was a member of the Group Analytic Society founded by S.H. Foulkes in London, and in 1980 he founded the Italian Society of Group Analysis, based on this theoretical principle. By "group analysis" he means the substitution of the "monadic" representation of the mind (psyche) with its structurally relational representation (relation between inner groupings, the idem, and reorganizative or creative disposition, the autos). He has published two books in Italian: Di palo in frasca (Milan: Corpo 10, 1986) and Individualità e gruppalità (Turin: Boringhieri, 1987). Most of his work has been published in the Italian Journal of Group Analysis (Rivista Italiana di GruppoAnalisi), edited by SGAI and two other group-analytic associations. [dinapol@tin.it]

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (b. 1943) is currently Professor and Director of the Russian Program, University of California, Davis. He holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Brown University (1972). Currently he is completing a psychoanalytic study of the veneration of religious icons in Russia. Among his books: Five Russian Poems: Exercises in a Theory of Poetry (Englewood, New Jersey: Transworld Publishers, 1977). Sign and Subject: Semiotic and Psychoanalytic Investigations Into Poetry (Lisse, The Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1978), volume 14 of the series Studies in Semiotics. Out From Under Gogol's Overcoat: A Psychoanalytic Study. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis Publishers, 1982). Signs of the Flesh: An Essay on the Evolution of Hominid Sexuality (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1985; reprinted by Indiana University Press, 1992). The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis Publishers, 1988). Editor of Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989). Signs of the Flesh: An Essay on the Evolution of Hominid Sexuality (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992). Tolstoy's Pierre Bezukhov: A Psychoanalytic Study (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993). Editor of Self-Analysis in Literary Study (New York: New York University Press, 1994). The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (New York: New York University Press, 1995). Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother (London and New York: Macmillan, 1998). Russian Nationalism from an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Imagining Russia (Lewinston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). [darancourlaferriere@ucdavis.edu]

Mikhail Reshetnikov, M.D., a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, lives and works in St.-Petersburg. He is founder and director of the East-European Psychoanalytic Institute, President of the National Psychoanalytic Federation of Russia and editor of the journal (in Russian) Psychoanalytical Bulletin. His books and articles include: "Drive to the Death" in Thanatology (St.-Petersburg: East European Psychoanalytic Institute,1994); The Modern Russian Mentality (Moscow: Rissiyskie Vesty, 1996); "La Question de la Psychanalyse en Russie. Rapport du Co-President de la RPA", SYNAPSE - Journ. de Psychiatrie et Système Nerveux Central, 143, 1998. p. 55-60; "Interpersonal Psychoanalysis of Garry Sullivan", Vestnik Psihoanalysa [Psychoanalytical Bulletin], 1999; "Hetero-, Homo-, Neo-, Bi-?", Vestnik Psihoanalysa, 1999; "The Essential Question of Training of Psychotherapists", Vestnik Psihoanalysa, 1999; "Main Ways to Get Professional Recognition in Psychoanalysis", Vestnik Psihoanalysa, 1999; "Actual Questions of Reforms in Russian Psychotherapy", Vestnik Psihoanalysa, 2000; "Methodological Meaning of Classification, Concepts of Norm and Pathology", Vestnik Psihoanalysa, 2001; "Statistics or Case?" in Helmut Thomae and Horst Kaechele, eds., The Modern Psychoanalysis: Reasserts (St.-Petersburg: East European Psychoanalytic Institute, 2001); "About Filiations" in Wladimir Granov, ed., The Future of the Oedipal Complex (St.-Petersburg: East European Psychoanalytic Institute, 2001). [in-psa-rus@peterlink.ru]

Giancarlo Rigon, M.D., psychiatrist and child neuropsychiatrist, director of Child Neuropsychiatry Operational Unit ion Bologna. As a psychoanalyst he trained with the Psychotherapy and Human Sciences Group and the Psychoanalytical Seminar of Zurich. He teaches at Bologna University in the Specialization Schools for Psychiatry and Child Neuropsychiatry. He is the author of several articles on different aspects of child and adolescent psychoanalysis and psychiatry. He has edited, with other authors, various publications: La risposta psicoterapeutica (Rome: Borla, 1986), Pedagogia speciale dell'integrazione (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996), Interventi in psichiatria e psicoterapia dell'età evolutiva (Milan: Franco Angeli) currently in print.

John R. Searle is Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous works on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, which include: Speech Acts, The Construction of Social Reality, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), Minds, Brains and Science, Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Expression and Meaning, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: New York Review Books, 1997).

Raffaele Siniscalco is an Italian journalist working in New York for RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana, author of many cultural programs about American and Italian culture.

Maria Luisa Tapparo, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, a group-analyst, and a member of APRAGI (Turin). She leads groups in several Italian institutions. She has worked in a camp of Kosovar refugees in Tirana (Albania). She follows youth groups (VIDES) who volunteer at an international level.

Janet Thormann obtained her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches English Literature at the College of Marin, Kentfield, California. She is also on the Faculty of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, Berkeley, California. She is editor of the journal Anamorphosis (journal of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies) and associate editor of the journal Literature and Psychoanalysis. She is the author of three books of poetry and of numerous articles on Old and Middle English poetry, Shakespeare, and modern literature. [JanetThormann@aol.com]