Editorial

Interaction is a subject in the psychoanalytical discourse upon which an increasing number of psychoanalysts focus their interest. In volume one of our journal Darlene Bregman Ehrenberg as well as Helene Kafka refer to this theme. Roberta Ann Shechter addresses the same topic in her beautiful report of a successful psychotherapy with a male homosexual patient.

While interpretation addresses the verbal formulation of transference and countertransference phenomena and intends to convey information to the patient concerning areas of the personality, which are unconscious and unknown to the patient, interaction is more direct and expressive of the actual moment and the total context of doctor/patient relating. To a high degree interaction covers the affective exploration of the other person (1), the affective interplay between analyst and analysand and the affective inquiry of the world. According to my view, it links up very nicely with Winnicott's thoughts on regression to dependency and contains the impact of the analytical situation on the mood and the hedonistic tone of the patient when the analyst becomes a transformational object (2).

The psychoanalytical discussion of the tension between interaction and interpretation also corresponds to the discourse in other fields. What I have in mind is especially the contemporary challenging of modernity, the objections towards rationality, the disbelief in progress as defined in exclusively economic terms and the growing interest in the subject in the political, philosophical and intellectual discourse.

Questions of rationality are associated with a conflict between oral and written communication (3), between rhetoric and logic, and thereby with the discussion between Plato and Aristotle. Plato condemned the Sophist's use of rhetoric as “making the worse argument appear the better”. To this Aristotle replied, that he treated questions about the conditions on which, and the circumstances in which arguments carry conviction, as