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‘es ist sehr kompliziert, das dumme Leben’
‘It is very complicated, this stupid life.’ Thus Martha Bernays complained to Freud in October 1884 at a stressful point in their courtship, which Michael Molnar in his review essay on volume 4 of the Brautbriefe in this issue associates with the two lovers ‘continually making and unmaking their future, making and unmaking the selves they have imagined’, paying the anxieties and complexities of life their due. Conceived before the Covid-19 pandemic had emerged into the global limelight, and due to come out several months from now in a world it is impossible yet to anticipate except in rather stark and alarming terms, current events have brought a note of fallibility and brokenness to this Editorial task - not the least because of the historic recollection of the deadly influenza pandemic which, a hundred years ago, took away Freud's favourite daughter Sophie, pregnant with her third child. But in addition, 1920 is the centenary of that other blight on human comfort: Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle;1 it is therefore the centenary of the ‘death drive’ itself. And there is a further reason for striking an elegiac note - the loss in February of the brilliant and pioneering scholar of psychoanalysis, Ferenc Erős, whose obituary by Anna Borgos, Márta Csabai, Júlia Gyimesi and Kata Lénárd follows immediately after these pages.
It is for all these reasons that I have found myself thinking of loss and disaggregation while putting this issue together. Melinda Friedrich's article ‘Psychoanalysts on the Podium’, dedicated to the memory of Ferenc Erős,