Editorial

The choice of scientific papers contained in this issue represents an important innovation in the scope of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review. Until now, the policy has (with a single exception) been to only accept for publication articles which have been written by trained psychoanalysts. The motivation has been the explicit wish to secure a strictly psychoanalytic profile of the journal, accompanied by the tacit assumption that no-one could possess a sufficiently profound knowledge of psychoanalysis without being a trained analyst. The latter idea is probably well-founded as far as clinical observations and their interpretation is concerned, but it is certainly narrow-minded when the subject is the impact of Freudian thought on contemporary research in the humanities, an area that fascinates most psychoanalysts, but in which we have to regard ourselves as more-or-less initiated amateurs.

In September 1989, a symposium was held in Oslo with the theme “Ibsen, Freud and Psychoanalysis”. It was the outcome of a collaboration between the Department of Psychology and of the History of Nordic Literature at the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society. Five papers read on this occasion (three of them written by non-psychoanalytic scholars) have been selected by the editorial board to inaugurate a new policy of publication. We hope that the quality of these articles will convince our readers as to the fruitfulness of widening our scope, but at the same time hasten to affirm that the main part of our journal will, no doubt, even in the future be reserved for articles by Scandinavian psychoanalysts.