Editorial

The three first articles of this issue of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, by Sølvi Kristiansen, Gudrun Bodin, and Pentti Ikonen, respectively, are based on presentations made at the Nordic Psychoanalytic Congress in Helsinki, held in July 2010 on the theme of “The Object and The Other”.

Sølvi Kristiansen makes use of her experience as a psychoanalytic reader in understanding the internal world of the author Mageruite Duras and that of her novel's main character, Lol V Stein. This does not mean assuming the position of a safely distant analyst of a writer/analysand who is not physically there to receive -or resist - the interpretations given. On the contrary, Kristiansen self-reflectively wrestles with her identifications with the author and her work, and produces a powerful text that in turn profoundly affects the reader. “The absent pain of Lol. V Stein: reflections on psychic pain based on a reading of Marguerite Duras” has been selected as the free internet article of this issue.

Leaning on the story of Adam and Eve and its emphasis on the necessity to accept reality and to abstain from immediate gratification of libidinal and aggressive impulses, Gudrun Bodin, in “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden: the pain of growing wiser,” tells us about a severely traumatized child-analytic patient and her struggles with maturing and accepting life and self as they are. Bodin, I should add, makes her patient's struggle understandable by linking the Biblical story to Greek mythology - notably to the story of Prometheus, who brought fire to the mortals, thereby enabling them to live in a more advanced manner than animals - as well as to Kleinian and Freudian metapsychology. Her emphasis on Biblical lore, nonetheless, places her in a tradition that is familiar to the readers of this journal in recent years, in which a recurring topic has been the link between psychoanalysis to (a modernist understanding of) the ethos of Judaism.

In Helsinki, Pentti Ikonen, who to many psyc