Editorial

Having communicated with some 150 authors during the past 4 years (more than half of whose contributions have been published as Original Articles, Brief Communications, and Book Reviews), I have found myself regularly using the expression “our journal”. The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review is indeed ours, owned by the Psychoanalytic Societies in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden and subscribed to by the members of these societies. However, our journal also aspires to be international and to attract contributors and readers from all over the world: it is broad in scope and open to different psychoanalytic schools and to different perspectives on or applications of psychoanalysis; it welcomes any contribution that relates to psychoanalysis, including by questioning some aspect of it, as long as its author demonstrates knowledge in psychoanalysis and a serious interest in its empirical field, that is, internal reality and the conscious and unconscious workings of human experience. I trust that it will continue to be open to contributions from neuroscience, the social sciences, critical historical discussions, and from writers knowledgeable in the fine arts. Psychoanalysis itself crosses the boundaries of all of these areas of knowledge.

This issue of The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review begins with a film essay by Siri Erika Gullestad that cannot but elicit the reader's interest in the controversial figure who is at its center, the Danish film maker Lars von Trier. Although I personally had decided that I had enough of von Trier after his seemingly endless misogynic excesses in his films and his anti-semitic slurs at the latest Cannes film festival, Gullestad's article reawakened my recognition of his sensitivity to unconscious aspects of human relations generally and to psychotherapeutic relations in particular - indeed, to internal reality. His film, Antichrist, in Gullestad's essay, emerges as a sharp critique of contemporary, externalizing and ruthlessly corr