Sweden

In 1997, the scientific committee of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society included David Titelman (chair), Martha Baraibar, Eva Gordon and

Magnus Kihlbom. In addition, Franziska Ylander continued her engagement, preparing a second post-graduate writing seminar under the auspices of the committee.

Invited guests from abroad have given lectures to the Society, presented public lectures, and led clinical seminars with groups of members as well as with advanced candidates. Scientific meetings were usually well attended, and public lectures – arranged in cooperation with the Society's public relations committee – were generally sold out to the last seat.

The list of scientific meetings reflects an ambition to provide room for divergent psychoanalytical orientations and applications. It also reflects current debates in the Society and the scientific committee as well as in the surrounding larger society. The re-emerging battle cries, in Sweden as elsewhere, accusing psychoanalysis of being unscientific (among many other horrible things), have stimulated our interest in psychoanalysis as basic research. Attacks on psychoanalysis in academia and in the press consistently neglect that psychoanalytic inquiry is a complement to other branches of neuroscience, the latter of which approach the mind with physiological and biochemical methods. In light of this, the committee has planned a series of seminars in which psychoanalysts and distinguished neuroscientific researchers outside of our group will meet. These seminars will start in 1998, but the meeting on 29 September 1997, Two images of the same child: a discussion between a psychoanalyst and a neuropsychologist, was a first specimen of these aspirations. The theme of the now traditional Symposium the day before the Society's annual meeting, Psychoanalysis and scientific research, also derives from the discussions in the committee, albeit that the immediate stimulus to selecting this topic was a debate in connection with the