Editorial

In the new ‘Documents’ section of this issue of Psychoanalysis and History we are pleased to include an unpublished paper by Karin Stephen, an important figure in the history of British psychoanalysis. Contextualized by Michael Brearley and introduced by Noel Bradley (the Californian colleague who has generously offered us the manuscript from his archives), this article, written and presented to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1945, deals with some of the theoretical problems concerning the origins of the ego and the superego and their complex relationship in classical structural theory.

A remarkable slice of psychoanalytic history is vividly portrayed by Renata Gaddini, doyenne of Italian child psychoanalysis, in her ‘A World of Yesterday’ - a brief but intense impressionistic personal account of her encounters with some of the best-known analysts of the last century: among others, Margaret Mahler, Helene Deutsch, Phyllis Greenacre, Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Erik Erikson and Anna Freud (with her delicious Viennese hot chocolate and cream…).

Ernst Falzeder, editor of the Freud/Ferenczi's correspondence, reviews the early history of the psychoanalytic profession (from the 1890s to the foundation of the Berlin Institute in 1920), from its initial informality to the gradual establishment of ever more stringent training requirements - with all their limitations - by psychoanalytic institutions.

The other papers published in this issue deal with a variety of aspects of Freud's work examined in broad cultural perspectives. American researcher Jay Geller suggests, on the basis of a newly-discovered first review of the Studien fiber Hysterie, an original interpretation of the paradigmatic ‘dream of Irma's injection’ by identifying ‘Irma’ as Ilona Weiss.

Mark Solms highlights, in fascinating historical and theoretical detail, the continuity between Freud's early neuro-psychological projects and the discoveries of the great neurologist Aleksander Romanov Luria (hi