Editorial

Looking out through the window of my countryside house, where I write these lines, I see a landscape where an uncounted number of wild flowers and grasses grow among trees and bushes. However, different and dissimilar they may be, they form together that exquisite pattern of vegetation which we in Sweden call löväng. My dictionary gives ‘forrest meadow’ as translation, but I doubt that this expression gives quite appropriate associations. The löväng I refer to is the result of the encounter of the original flora and fauna with careful human cultivation during hundreds of years by cutting the grasses and flowers by scythe, and letting domesticated animals—horses, cows, goats—graze.

We psychoanalysts sometimes express regret, and even feelings of shame, over the fact that our discipline is so little scientifically developed. Our theories and methods are not suited to bring forward specific and predetermined results in the way e.g. the pharmacologically working psychiatrist may do. Just as the DNA-specialist will never be able to create a löväng, the special biotope that we call ‘the psychoanalytic situation’ can never result from the application of drugs or similar methods, but will only ensue through a very delicate process of interaction in a dyadic situation between cultivated, skilful interventions and ‘wild’, natural processes. Our methods will probably always have to be algorithmic in the sense that Levenson outlined in his paper ‘Follow the fox’ (1).

The löväng may also serve as a metaphor for the general scientific field. In this context it points to the necessity of ecological concordance between different scientific disciplines, even if they are very diverse in many respects. In his discussion on Metapsychological Considerations Gedo (2) writes: “Clinical theories must be judged against the criterion of psychological validity. In contrast, metapsychological propositions must be evaluated in terms of their congruence with the conclusions of other disciplines, a