Editorial

This issue of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review includes 6 original manuscripts. Only one of them, “On creating a psychoanalytic mind,” by Fred Busch, can be described as a traditional psychoanalytic study in which individual case material illustrates a hypothesis about unconscious human functioning and clinical techniques. “Process knowing”, Busch convincingly brings home, is a crucial aspect of psychoanalytic treatment and of the development of the patient's identity. The concept refers to taking the step from merely thinking to letting your thought processes include thinking about thinking. Each in their own way, Bion, Fonagy and Target, Green, and several other writers cited by Busch have addressed this perspective. Busch's clinical examples convey that his patients learn to think about themselves in this new way by interacting with an analyst who is psychically present, reflecting, and therefore, I contend, also caring.

The next article, “Affect regulation in extreme traumatization” by Suzanne Kaplan and Dori Laub, is a report from applied psychoanalytic research on chronically hospitalized, psychotic Holocaust survivors: the authors view psychosis as a maladaptive, defensive strategy erected against annihilation anxiety; and they make use of countertransference as a source of information about the interviewed individuals and the group and predicament that they represent; and they listen attentively to what the participants say and do not say. Kaplan and Laub also apply a previously developed model for affect regulation and expression, “The affect propeller”. I have heard psychoanalytically oriented researchers in the academic world express their appreciation of this model. Nonetheless, it is the power of the interview material itself, as registered by researchers who were able to remain open and sensitive to it, that remains in this reader's mind. As is the case with other psychoanalytic studies on the Holocaust, an unspoken question seems to underlie the