Editorial

Dear Readers,

The issue of Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review you are holding contains the second part of our special issue on ‘Transmissions,’ featuring seven additional articles covering a range of clinical and empirical topics. With this publication, we complete the presentation of the most significant contributions to the Nordic Psychoanalytic Congress held in Oslo last year.

In the article ‘Transmissions, Shifts and Transformations in the Field – Balancing Pain, Enjoyment, and Vitality,’ Fredrik Capellen describes the psychoanalytic treatment of a traumatized seven-year-old boy. A central question he raises is whether psychoanalysts may be overly focused on the negative aspects of a patient’s material. In this case, the therapeutic process revealed that joy, vitality, and play also held essential curative value. Capellen emphasizes the role of play – as conceptualized by Winnicott – as a key element of the treatment.

Transmissions and moments of transformation are often deeply connected to transference work. In her article ‘Awakening Process from a Closed Transference State,’ Pepita Hänninen explores the challenges and opportunities that arise when patients become aware of recurring relational patterns within the therapeutic relationship. She discusses both the potential and the obstacles of such awakenings, focusing on the patient’s subjective experience of change. This is of utmost clinical relevance, as the article focuses on the core of the psychoanalytic change process: working within the transference, with particular emphasis on how the patient experiences these moments of change.

Fredrika Stjärne, in ‘The Art of Psychoanalysis,’ portrays the analytic process as one of deconstruction and reconstruction. Much like the creative process experienced by artists, the analytic situation provides a framework for creativity that begins with the deconstruction of existing structures and modes of experience. It then contains a certain degree of ‘chaos’ until a new confi