Editorial

One of the projects our Journal has carried forward since its early days is the exploration of those philosophical ideas which have provided a historical background to the development of psychoanalysis. More specifically, the relevance of ‘utilitarianism’ for Freud's thinking has been examined in articles, published in past issues of Psychoanalysis and History, on Mill and on Brentano. This topic is now further examined by the Israeli scholar Aner Govrin who argues that the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were a main source for Freud's early metapsychology, in particular in relation to his conceptualization of the Pleasure Principle, though they were abandoned in his later theories.

In an essay on the discovery of the Oedipus complex, American researcher Kenneth Fuchsman recalls biographical details of Freud's own family in order to emphasize the historical importance of the shift in its size and structure, from cross-generationally ‘extended’ in the first years of his life in Freiberg, to ‘nuclear’ after he moved to Vienna. Fuchsman believes that Freud's ‘conflicted identity impacted on his ability to present a clear view of his own family's dynamics and a consistent oedipal theory’. One of our tasks, he concludes, ‘is to recover the multi-complexities of the family romance [Freud] both revealed and concealed, and to place the dynamics of the Oedipus complex within the full family context in which it unfolds’.

The case of Sabina Spielrein—Jung's first analytic patient, his lover and an original psychoanalytic theoretician herself—is currently enjoying much public attention. This is not just from analytical psychologists: she is the protagonist of at least a couple of stage dramas, two excellent films, several articles and a new major biography. British psychoanalytic historian Janet Sayers revisits here this celebrated pioneer of our profession to argue that Spielrein's writings, coloured as they are by her intense transferential, sexual and