Editorial

Psychoanalysis is often said to be the offspring of two movements in modernity, a rationalistic one connected with the natural sciences, and a hermeneutic one, closer to linguistics and other humanistic disciplines. Today, the whole project of modernity is under debate. In the political field we have seen the fall of communism, and Wallerstein (1) argues that in fact it is rather the end of liberalism that we are witnessing and taking part in. The “cartesian myth” (2) which for many centuries has been the basis for the development of science is increasingly questioned by philosophers and scientists. In humanistic disciplines terms like post-structuralism and postmodernism have been in vogue for some time and already seem to fade away. H. Friedrich contributes with his essay in this issue, “Contemporary Psychoanalytic Identity and Its Roots in the History of Sciences”, to an understanding of our place in the history of sciences and our search for future paths for psychoanalysis.

Béla Grunberger has kindly given us permission to reprint his paper “On Narcissism, Aggressivity and Antisemitism”. Creative vision into the dark areas of human existence is one of our most urgent tasks and one for which psychoanalytic methods offer unique possibilities.

The papers by Joyce McDougall, Montague Ullman and Gaetano Benedetti presented in this issue deserve careful reading and consideration from different points of view. Here I will however restrict myself to one aspect which I find common to those articles, and which I already mentioned in connection with Béla Grunberger—creative vision. I will quote a few lines from Ullman's contribution to a collection of “Voices on the Threshold of Tomorrow” (3) to underline the importance of unfolding this ability:

The population at large has been conditioned to be taken in by lies, big and small, and not to see what is clearly there to be seen (…). Our dreaming psyche arises out of an incorruptible core of our being that, in contrast to our wa