From the Editors

In our opening essay, Peter Rudnystky takes Austin Ratner's The Psychoanalyst's Aversion to Proof as the launching site for a lively debate regarding the historical and theoretical underpinnings of psychoanalytic “proof aversion.” Rudnytsky admires Ratner's courage and persistence, and the depth of his thinking. “Who can fail to admire an independent scholar,” Rudnytsky asks, “who, in 2012, singlehandedly waged a battle ‘to edit the lead paragraph of Freud's Wikipedia page,’ even though he knew that every morning he ‘would face a torrent of irrational hostility’ from an opponent?” Rudnytsky differs with Ratner's view that “Freud's proof aversion [is] the root cause of his problems, and his authoritarianism … an effect of that underlying tendency.” Rudnystky argues that “where Ratner falls short is in his perfunctory references to hermeneutics, which do not take into account that, both as an encounter between the unique subjectivities of two human beings in the clinical setting and as a method of investigation into every facet of culture, the hermeneutic dimension of psychoanalysis is ineluctable.” In Rudnystky's view psychoanalysis is, ultimately, “as a theory of mind … a natural science, but as both a clinical practice and a method of critical inquiry it is a historical science; and it is a category error to suppose that interpretations can ever be demonstrated with mathematical certainty.”

In Mourning: Its Traces in Character and the Body (Los duelos: Huellas en el carácter y registro corpora), Marillé Truscello de Manson, an Argentinian psychoanalyst renowned for her publications on mourning, brings to this concept a novel approach, complementary to the traditional object-relations perspective. In her review, Marie-Ange Pongis relates Truscello's metapsychological and clinical approach to mourning in the context of early somatic pathologies. She argues that “what is not psychically elaborated leaves traces in the body,” and produces somatic