Editorial

So, today was the lecture about ‘Everyday Life’. I was happy that I could speak before approximately three hundred young and enthusiastic medical students, who listened to my (or, that is to say, your) words with bated breath. (Ferenczi to Freud; see Ferenc Erős, this issue, p. 7)

This special issue singles out the Hungarian ‘voice’ in psychoanalysis. As psychoanalysts, the protagonists here pay particular attention to voice, as the conduit for multiple meanings between speakers and listeners, and to voices heard again internally. But these articles also focus on what happens to voices in their specific contexts. In the quote above, Ferenczi's voice (and via him that of Freudian psychoanalysis) is momentarily massively amplified in the Hungarian context of the Galileo Circle, in 1909, and ten years later receives an even more significant institutional authorization on the platform of Budapest University; Alice Balint, in her diaries, ventriloquizes her own voice, as well as those of her husband, her mother and her analyst (Ferenczi again); Michael Balint's voice is misheard or deflected by Winnicott across the floor of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. These articles are very much about dialogue and dialects, the grain of interpersonal encounters, as well as a kind of thoughtful jostling for the last word, for new forms of expression, for articulating the potentials of psychoanalysis as well as its transmission, for who can speak of or for the unconscious.