The editorial 1/2018

In the present issue we publish articles on an exceptional variety of topics. There is first of all the text by Arne Jemstedt on the presence of the analyst and the analysand. It was read as one of the key notes in the Nordic congress in Turku 9.-12.8. 2018. The theme of the congress was ‘Presence and absence’. In the next issue we will publish a number texts presented in the same congress. In his contribution Thomas Jung interprets some of the poetic formulations of Bertolt Brecht, who was living in exile in the Scandinavia during the world war, relating them with poems Mario Benedetti, a well-known writer from Uruguay, and also with his own experiences as an architect working in a project with immigrants.

There are four texts that address French psychoanalysis. We did not plan in advance to make a special issue of French psychoanalysis, but it became a kind of one. In her article Judy Gammelgaard discusses the non-symbolic level of psychic reality, addressing not only Freud’s theoretical ideas but also the conceptual models of Jean Laplanche and Jacques Lacan. Catharina Engström presents an overview of some of the key ideas of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, an eminent French analyst, especially concerning the importance of sexuality, the drives and psychic conflict in psychoanalysis. And then we have two texts in which a Lacanian analyst discusses the ideas of the Master. Julio Garcia Salas presents Lacan’s ideas concerning the subject who is analysed, emphasizing that the focus is on how and what it is spoken in the sessions, instead of what it is spoken about. Salas explains and also defends the Lacanian practice of varying the length of a session, and does this by writing about his own work with an analysand. Finally, Tobias Wessely and Pablo Lerner have has made an interview of Bruce Fink, arguably the most important writer on Lacan in English. Like Salas, Fink emphasises the clinical significance of the Lacanian approach. We hope that for the readers not so well a