Editorial

This issue opens with Annika Hirdman Künstlicher's plenary lecture, representing the (new) Swedish Psychoanalytical Association, at the Nordic Psychoanalytic Congress in Helsinki, 2010. The parenthetical “new” is to acknowledge that a merger of two psychoanalytic societies has taken place in Sweden in 2010, an event that is said to be unique in the history of psychoanalysis, in which division and splintering are more common than unions between existing groups. Annika Künstlicher, in any case, is one of a handful of bridge-builders who were members of both of the previous Swedish psychoanalytical societies prior to their merger. The orientation of her lecture would seem to befit this position by being post-modern rather than mainstream, “modernist” psychoanalytic. It combines Freudian perspectives with the application of Ogden and Britton's possibly different concepts of “the third” as well with the philosophical construct the Other, albeit in the descriptive form of “the other”, which I nonetheless read as a tribute to Emanuel Levinas as well as to Jacques Lacon. Künstlicher applies these amalgamated psychoanalytic theories and philosophical perspectives to a clinical case, the name of which suggestively refers to the vulture-like mother figure of The Pelican, a play by Strindberg (a literary icon of modernism). However, her impressive synthesis is perhaps less complicated than I have implied. For is it not true that all major theorists within psychoanalysis as well as in philosophy struggle to elucidate the same areas of human experience and knowledge? In addition to Levinas, consider, for example, Wittgenstein whose authority Torberg Foss summons in his discussion on psychoanalysis and religion later in this issue. And isn't it correct to say that all of these writers employ what Schafer (1980) has called “refined common sense”?

So I may be mistaken in my first impression that Annika Künstlicher's text stands in contrast to the next article of this issue, “A conver