Editorial

The current issue of our journal features articles by an international group of contributors. Their different traditions of research are reflected both in their approach to a wide variety of topics (e.g. linking psychoanalysis and history with philosophy, politics, literature or biography) and in their styles of presentation (e.g. more academic, informative or clinical). Such a polyphonic range of papers provides us with the enriching opportunity to make some still unfamiliar cultural territories available to our exploration.

We open with an article by Israeli historian, Eran Rolnik, who scholarly and creatively questions some of the fascinating issues which constitute the core itself of our editorial project: the relationship between psychoanalysis, history and historiography, their theoretical foundations and practical applications. This paper is followed by a discursive analysis by Dutch scholar Jaap Bos of the institutionally controversial ‘question’ of lay analysis. French psychoanalyst Claude Nachin considers the evolving importance of the technical concepts of ‘tact’ (in the work of Sandor Ferenczi and Michael Balint) and of ‘resonance’ (in that of Nicolas Abraham). Christfried Tögel reports on his original research on Jenö Varga, a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society who had also been the Minister of Finance in Bela Kun's Soviet government. We then present Finnish literary historian Leena Eilittä's study on the subject of Franz Kafka's ambivalent relationship to Freud and psychoanalysis. We conclude with American psychohistorian Lawrence Friedman's analysis of the links between Erik Erikson's life and his theories on identity, generativity and ‘pseudospeciation’.

As usual, we shall welcome any responses to the complex, thought-provoking issues raised by these articles that you may want to share with us.

Finally, we are pleased to inform our readers that Psychoanalysis and History, jointly with the Freud Museum in London, organized a multi-disciplinar