Editorial

At the near-centenary of the invention of psychoanalysis, in the post-Cold War early 1990s, the eminent Swiss psychoanalyst Berthold Rothschild delivered a talk in Zurich at a small conference that had been organized around the theme of ‘The Terminability of Psychoanalysis’. With its title an obvious and poignant nod to Freud's late-in-life meditation on the limits of ‘the talking cure's’ capacities to heal, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (Freud, 1937), the conference brought together analysts and scholars from various European countries to reflect on whether psychoanalysis as an enterprise had perhaps exhausted itself - or was in need of significant reinvention if it was to survive. Rothschild's talk was erudite, hilarious and earnest at once. We are pleased to be printing it here - for the first time in English translation - as an unusual and wonderful recovered historical document (along with a little postscript written for the occasion). While for some readers, it may seem peculiar to think of January 1992 as properly belonging to ‘history’ at all, the text is after all now a full quarter-century old. And if we take measure of both the proximity and the distance between then and our present - the war in Bosnia would break out a few months after the conference and with it the optimism that had accompanied Soviet communism's passing would receive its first serious blow, but we were nowhere near the level of grim despair about the globe's prospects at which we find ourselves now - we will see the usefulness of revisiting how the past and the future looked to a perceptive observer just then.

The text works on multiple levels. At the most basic, it provides an alternate telling of the history of Psychoanalysis (with a capital P) - as though she were an old woman, close to 100 years of age, one whose paternity was uncertain (although Sigmund Freud claimed it), and one who had had, over the decades, countless lovers, many of whom were seductive and some of whom