Editorial

I

Even if Freud himself was hesitant to admit, philosophy is one of the important disciplines for psychoanalysis. Philosophers work with very much the same questions as analysts, concerning personal integrity, self-awareness, freedom, and ethics, among others. And interestingly, in both disciplines there is no single approach that could supply definitive answer to the fundamental questions and a plurality of possible approaches prevails. In both there is always space for further questions, reflections and perspectives. Presumably this is so because the problems in both fields are of the kind that they only rarely allow reaching definitive answers or solutions.

Philosophers work with conceptual problems that exceed the limits of our knowledge. The answers to those questions are more or less convincing depending how well they are argued. Philosophers work with concepts and theories, illustrating their ideas with empirical examples. Psychoanalysis in contrast is an empirical discipline. Its heart is the process between the analyst and the analysand, which then may be elucidated, reflected and perhaps justified with various concepts and theoretical approaches. Psychoanalysis is a very particular empirical discipline, however, because the dynamic unconscious, which is at the core of its research object, cannot be perceived directly, nor captured by any single theoretical approach. Thus psychoanalysts too work with questions that exceed the limits of our knowledge and that for this reason do not allow unequivocal solutions.

II

Philosophy has always come up in plural, as a multitude of approaches, and this is true of the contemporary philosophy more than ever. Different approaches open different perspectives and different kinds of answers to the problems at hand, and each of the approaches is built on conceptual conditions of certain kind. One possible and very general distinction is the following: first, there are those philosophical approaches that are closer to everyday exp