Editorial

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, psychoanalytic thinking and practice have been finding a new forum (and market) in Eastern European countries, including those from the former Soviet Union. It should be of interest to place such a (re)discovered interest in the context of the relationship the former Communist regime entertained with our profession. While many of our readers may be familiar with Trotsky's sympathetic, and Stalin's openly hostile, attitude towards it, Lenin's views are perhaps less well known; we welcome here Jacquy Chemouni's scholarly research on Lenin's ambivalent fascination for psychoanalysis, and on his knowledge, misunderstanding and ultimate rejection of it, and more specifically of its progressive, but for that reason also ‘dangerous’, theories of sexuality.

The next articles consider the work of two powerful and influential women in recent British history: Riviere and Sinclair. Joan Riviere's article on ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’ —which had considerable impact not only on clinical practice but also on the application of feminist analytic theories to art and literature—is revisited here by psychoanalyst Athol Hughes (Riviere's biographer and editor) in the cultural context of the time, as well as in relation to Riviere's personal experiences and views of women.

Literary critic Philippa Martindale presents her study on the effect of psychoanalytic ideas (especially those relevant to female psychology) on the novels of Modern writer May Sinclair and gives us a detailed account of that writer's involvement with one of the first psychotherapeutically-oriented institutions in England, the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London (1913-22).

Still in the cultural area of the cross-fertilization between psychoanalysis and literature, American scholar Elizabeth Goodstein presents us with an account of the ‘difficult’ relationship between Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, their meetings, correspondence and mutual influence, and suggests a fascinatin