Editorial

This issue of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review includes three clinically grounded psychoanalytic articles, one of which is part of an ongoing research project on the psychoanalytic treatment of infants and their mothers, and two philosophical contributions. The first of the philosophical articles, by Alfred Tauber, is on the intellectual history of psychoanalysis and on Freud's lasting, ambivalent attraction to philosophy. The second, by Siegfried Zepf, is a new turn on a classical theme in psychoanalytic self-reflection: the place and meanings of identification and identification concepts in our theory. This constellation of clinical and theoretical articles reflects a tradition that by itself may be one answer to the massive and monotonous attacks on psychoanalysis in the media and elsewhere today: at least in this country (I sometimes wonder whether we continue to work as psychoanalysts because people continue to seek and benefit from our help, and we continue to think hard and write about what it is we do. The focus of the first, above-mentioned clinical text, Björn Salomonsson's “Mother-infant work and its impact on psychoanalysis with adults”, is, however, far from traditional. It focusses on the psychoanalysis of distraught babies, new-born and older, who do not yet speak and symbolize, but nonetheless seem to be able to communicate with a sensitive psychoanalyst, who listens and talks to them and their mothers. Two cases are presented, one with a two-week-old infant and his mother and one with an adult woman. Salomonsson adds semiotic theories to his explanatory arsenal to understand the communication that takes place when the analyst uses his presence, his voice, and his words in talking both to the mother and to the baby itself. To a psychoanalytic reader, who like others may find the verbal interaction between a psychoanalytic consultant and a two-week-old baby boy beyond comprehension, the extrapolation of these experiences to the understanding of