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Compared to the impact of the work of Melanie Klein on the history of psychoanalysis, the contributions of her daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, passed almost unnoticed. At present, Schmideberg is solely remembered for having harshly attacked her mother at the start of the Controversial Discussions of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and for having coined the fitting expression "stable instability" in order to describe borderline and asocial personality disorders. However, the author discusses how the early groundbreaking discoveries of Klein with regards to primitive anxieties were the result of the joint work and thinking of Melanie and Melitta. Moreover, he argues that the conflict between the two, along with the subsequent polarization of their views, did not facilitate the development of psychoanalysis, neither did it help the analytic community to recognize the value of Melitta's contributions to psychoanalysis.

This article arises from the need to "present" (that is, to read again in a "present and actual" light) the paper, "Why Analysts Need Their Patients' Transferences" by Charles Rycroft (which first appeared in 1993 and is re-published in this Special Issue), and is therefore strictly connected to the ideas the latter contains. The authors, on the one hand, outline the stages of the journey that took Rycroft to elaborate the concept of "ablation of the parental images", and on the other, retrace his personal "analytic genealogy" and discover a "missing forefather", Sándor Ferenczi, who has represented for a long time a direct "missing link" in the history of psychoanalysis.

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This article aims to outline, in brief, the life and work of Charles Rycroft. He had been one of the brilliant and fecund psychoanalysts of the second half of the Twentieth century, although his legacy has unfortunately often been neglected. The author suggests that this might have been because of his withdrawal from the British Psychoanalytic Society, which made him, in many ways, "invisible" to his own colleagues and that continues even today-more than ten years after his death-to preclude a real recognition of his personal and original clinical thinking and working style.