Editorial

Most of the articles, book essays, and works discussed in the book essays of this issue of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review have a primary theoretical, epis-temological, or — to use Freud's term for the psychology of the unconscious — metapsychological focus; that is, all except Tomas Böhm's reflections on ethnic prejudice and antisemitism and Svein Friis' discussion of the recent, major work on psychosis and its psychological treatment, Psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenic psychoses, by Yrjö Alanen et al., albeit that Friis does discuss the methodology of psychoan-alytically informed psychiatric research. The majority of the writers who submit manuscripts to this journal seem to fight for their discipline not by carrying out empirical research (as recommended by Rolf Sandell in his review of From psychoanalytic narrative to empirical single case research by Kachele et al., in the previous issue of our journal*), but by developing ever more elaborate theories of the unconscious. This is so, notwithstanding that Freud in 1937, in Analysis, terminable and interminable, demonstrated that he was resigned to the experience that “what our Witch [metapsychology] reveals is neither very clear nor very detailed” (p. 225). But Freud's attitude was not completely pessimistic, for. in the same text, he wrote that without metapsychological speculation and theorizing, we cannot advance our understanding of the drives and of how we tame them. Freud's psychology of the unconscious was first outlined in chapter 7 of The interpretation of dreams . This was the time of an earlier resignation: of giving up his original vision of a biologically grounded, scientific psychology. In the 1920s, Freud's economic and topographic perspectives on the workings of the mind were developed into the ego-psychological or “structural” hypotheses that remain the backbone of most psychoanalytic theorizing to this day. The new model remains a skillful intuition of what is now clinically ev