The editorial 1/2018

In the present issue we publish articles on an exceptional variety of topics. There is first of all the text by Arne Jemstedt on the presence of the analyst and the analysand. It was read as one of the key notes in the Nordic congress in Turku 9.-12.8. 2018. The theme of the congress was ‘Presence and absence’. In the next issue we will publish a number texts presented in the same congress. In his contribution Thomas Jung interprets some of the poetic formulations of Bertolt Brecht, who was living in exile in the Scandinavia during the world war, relating them with poems Mario Benedetti, a well-known writer from Uruguay, and also with his own experiences as an architect working in a project with immigrants. There are four texts that address French psychoanalysis. We did not plan in advance to make a special issue of French psychoanalysis, but it became a kind of one. In her article Judy Gammelgaard discusses the non-symbolic level of psychic reality, addressing not only Freud’s theoretical ideas but also the conceptual models of Jean Laplanche and Jacques Lacan. Catharina Engström presents an overview of some of the key ideas of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, an eminent French analyst, especially concerning the importance of sexuality, the drives and psychic conflict in psychoanalysis. And then we have two texts in which a Lacanian analyst discusses the ideas of the Master. Julio Garcia Salas presents Lacan’s ideas concerning the subject who is analysed, emphasizing that the focus is on how and what it is spoken in the sessions, instead of what it is spoken about. Salas explains and also defends the Lacanian practice of varying the length of a session, and does this by writing about his own work with an analysand. Finally, Tobias Wessely and Pablo Lerner have has made an interview of Bruce Fink, arguably the most important writer on Lacan in English. Like Salas, Fink emphasises the clinical significance of the Lacanian approach. We hope that for the readers not so well acquainted with the French way of thinking these texts are rather informative and inspiring than frustrating and confusing. If one should try to characterise the distinctive nature of French psychoanalysis, certainly one good starting point would be the emphasis on the role of the other in its various forms. ‘Je est un autre’, Mallarme formulated, and Lacan, who has had an eminent influence on French psychoanalysis, both directly and indirectly, developed a very complicated, idiosyncratic and elusive theory of the others constituting a self. Lacan’s thinking is inspired by philosophers, especially by Hegel, as interpreted by Alexandr Kojéve. This philosophical orientation is one of the reasons that make it so challenging to conceive of and relate to for an analyst not acquainted with the French figures of thinking and writing. The Other is for Lacan many things, also somewhat different ones at different times. It is the unconscious of the early Freud, the ‘other place’ as Freud calls it in the Interpretation of Dreams. Language is the big Other that exists prior to an individual, enters the individual psyche and organises it, also the unconscious. In his later thinking Lacan was interested in the primary repression that brings about the Real as the ultimate Other beyond symbolisation. Woman is the Other that stands in opposition to the linguistic system and its ‘Name of the father’. The first and primary Other is the mother. Very influential have been Lacan’s ideas concerning the mother as a mirror for a toddler who creates an imaginary picture of herself as a whole that does not correspond her otherwise much more chaotic, fragmented and disorganised being in the world. Unlike for Winnicott, who in this connection writes about the shared transitional space and its developmental functions, for Lacan this imaginary self is a potentially narcissistic and alienating illusion. Jean Laplanche’s theory, according to which the mother in the early interaction unconsciously conveys enigmatic sexual messages that create an unconscious in the infant, could hardly be thought of without Lacan. And in the wellknown thoughts of André Green on the Dead Mother one can see the impact of both Winnicott and Lacan. Lacan emphasised that an analyst should by all means avoid satisfying the imaginary ego of the analysand in order to make room for the unconscious coming to speech. Among the means for accomplishing this is also the cutting of the session if needed, as Salas explains in his contribution. Even though Lacan’s scandalous ideas on varying the length of a session were largely rejected and Lacan was expelled from IPA, his insistence that an analysand should not be encouraged to idealise the analyst or take him as a new object has THE SCANDINAVIAN PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW 2018, VOL. 41, NO. 1, 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1080/01062301.2018.1544334