Edited by Antal Bókay, Ferenc Erõs (editor-in-chief), Kinga Göncz, György Hidas, Judit Mészáros, Júlia Vajda.

THALASSA is the journal of the Sándor Ferenczi Society, Budapest.
THALASSA is the title of Sándor Ferenczi's classical work.
THALASSA symbolically refers to the sea, the womb, the origin, the source.
THALASSA is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to free investigations in psychoanalysis, culture and society.
THALASSA has roots in the historical traditions of Hungarian psychoanalysis, but is not committed to any particular school or authority.
THALASSA welcomes all original contributions, historical, theoretical, or critical, dealing with the common problems of psychoanalysis and the humanities.

The first issue of THALASSA (1990/1) is based on the proceedings of the first scientific conference of the Sándor Ferenczi Society, held in Budapest, 1989, under the title Psychoanalysis and Society. The second issue (1991/1) is devoted to the life and work of Sándor Ferenczi. The third issue of our review (1991/2) deals with the relationship between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics. The fourth issue (1992/1) is devoted to the problems of the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. The fifth issue (1992/2) is a memorial volume devoted to the life and work of Géza Róheim. The sixth issue (1993/1) contains psychoanalytic studies on language, fiction and cognition. The seventh issue (1993/2) is devoted to the life work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The focus theme of the eighth and ninth issue (1994/1-2) are the effects and aftereffects of the Holocaust - from both psychoanalytic and psychosocial point of view. This issue commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. The tenth and eleventh issue (1995/1-2) contains articles on the relationship between psychoanalysis, postmodernism, art, and mass phenomena. The main topic of the twelfth issue (1996/1) is the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism and related issues. The thirteenth issue (1996/2) is devoted to the life and work of Leopold Szondi, the founder of “fate analysis", and published as well a series of newly discovered pre-psychoanalytic writings of Sándor Ferenczi. In our fourteenth issue (1996/3) we continued the series on psychoanalysis and feminism, and we published - among others - texts by Marcel Proust, Georg Groddeck and Bruno Bettelheim. The main topic of the fifteenth issue (1997/1) is the relationship between psychoanalysis and postmodernism. The sixteenth and seventeenth issue (1997/1-2) we started a series on psychoanalysts of Hungarian origin living in France; in this issue we published interviews with Béla Grünberger and Iván Fónagy. In the same issue, we published articles dealing with the history of psychoanalysis in Eastern Europe (Aleksandr Etkind, Wilhelm Reich and Petar Klein). The next, 1998/2 will contain - among other articles - a presentation of the life and work of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, psychoanalysts who emigrated from Hungary to France.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PRESENT ISSUE (1998/1)

In our section ATTACHMENT THEORIES we publish three contributions.

1. PETER FONAGY and MARY TARGET: Attachment and reflective function: their role in self-organization. The paper traces the relationship between attachment processes and the development of the capacity to envision mental states in self and others. We suggest that the ability to mentalize, to represent behavior in terms of mental states, or to have “a theory of mind" is a key determinant of self-organization which is required in the context of the child's early social relationships. Evidence for an association between the quality of attachment relationship and reflective function in the parent and the child is reviewed and interpreted in the context of current models of theory of mind development. A model of the development of self-organization is proposed which has at its core the caregiver's ability to communicate understanding of the child's intentional stance. The implications of the model for pathological self-development are explored, with specific reference to the consequences of maltreatment.

2. MARY TARGET: Representation of attachment in patients with severe personality disorder: Implications for practice. Psychoanalytic therapy is under savage attack in most countries where it is practiced. Yet the need for intensive psychosocial treatments for severe psychological disorders is illustrated by studies of outcome and are also increasingly seen as essential by behaviorists, cognitive therapists and those practicing systemic work with families. We recommend a shift in analytic technique from the unfocused, conflict and insight oriented approach to a focused, mentalization oriented therapy, which we believe is already widely used by those treating more severe psychological disturbance. Psychoanalytic training, supervision and personal treatment remain crucial in enabling clinicians to use their emotional reactions to better understand their patient's subjective world, rather than be entrapped in the quicksand of rigid, unthinking patterns of relatedness. The techniques suggested here and the theoretical ideas on which they are based may also be put to good effect in prevention, informing parenting training, home visitation programs, nursery education and crime prevention interventions. The change of aims and priorities we are suggesting is not radically new, or exclusive of other approaches. At its strongest, our claim is that severe disorders of character require modifications of technique in the direction of prioritizing a mentalizing approach. At its weakest, we are introducing new jargon into an area already bursting with terminological confusion. However, even here, there may be value added by harmonizing our language with that of developmental cognitive science.

GYÖRGY GERGELY and JOHN S. WATSON: The social biofeedback theory of parental affect-mirroring: The development of emotional self-awareness and self-control in infancy. The authors present a new theory of parental affect-mirroring and its role in the development of emotional self-awareness and control in infancy. It is proposed that infants first become sensitised to their categorical emotion-states through a natural social biofeedback process provided by the parent's `marked' reflections of the baby's emotion displays during affect-regulative interactions. They argue that this sensitisation process is mediated (similarly to that of adult biofeedback training) by the mechanism of contingency-detection and maximising. Apart from sensitisation, affect-mirroring serves three further developmental functions: (1) it contributes to the infant's state-regulation; (2) it leads to the establishment of secondary representations that become associated with the infant's primary procedural affect-states providing the cognitive means for accessing and attributing emotions to the self; (3) it results in the development of a generalised communicative code of `marked' expressions characterised by the representational functions of referential decoupling, anchoring and suspension of realistic consequences. They consider the clinical implications of our theory, relating it to current psychodynamic approaches to the functions of parental affect-mirroring. Using their model they identify various types of deviant mirroring styles and speculate about their developmental consequences. Finally, they discuss what role their social biofeedback model may play as a mediating mechanism in the therapeutic process.

In the WORKSHOP section we publish ANTAL P. ORMAY's essay entitled The place of the social self in the structure of personality. According to the author, with the advent of social biology it is possible to revise the classical instinct theory to include a social instinct. Then the structural theory of Id, Ego and Superego can be revised accordingly to include an instinct based social part which could be called Nos, Latin for We, to denote a genuine social function in the personality. Some of the implications in psychoanalysis, group analysis and sociology are examined.

The next section, HUNGARIAN PSYCHOANALYSTS IN PARIS II. represents a continuation of our series started in the 1997/1-2. issue. In this section we publish now an interview with the French psychoanalyst of Hungarian origin, JUDITH DUPONT, who retells her life story and comments on her professional activities. The interview, entitled “Psychoanalysis is my art" was made by FERENC ER[[Otilde]]S and JUDIT SZILASI. In his brief obituary NICHOLAS RAND commemorates MARIA TOROK, another French psychoanalyst of Hungarian origin who died in 1998. We also publish an interview with the psychoanalyst KATHLEEN KELLEY-LAINÉ, whose book Peter Pan ou l'enfant triste , written originally in French, was recently published in Hungarian. PÉTER ARADI interviews the French-Hungarian author on her book and her Hungarian roots.

In our ARCHIVES section we publish ANDOR HARRACH's lecture which was held on a memorial conference on MARGARET MAHLER in 1997 (Margaret Mahler's hundred years. Her personal and professional roots in Hungary). In the BOOKS section we publish an article by EDITH KURZWEIL ( The inimitable Bruno Bettelheim ), which reviews a book dealing with Bettelheim's controversial life and work.

We accept contributions in Hungarian, English, German or French. Authors are requested to provide their papers with an English and/or Hungarian summary. Original articles, reviews, reflections, and suggestions should be sent to Dr. Ferenc Erõs, Institute of Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Teréz krt. 13., H-1067 Budapest. Phone: (36-1) 322-0425, fax: (36-1) 342-0514. E-mail address: thalassa@c3.hu and feros@orange.okt.cogpsyphy.hu .

THALASSA is now available on Internet: http://www.c3.hu/scripta

THALASSA is published by the Thalassa Foundation, Budapest (address above). Subscription and distribution: SZIGET REHABILITÁCIÓS SZÖVETKEZET, Murányi u. 21, H-1078 Budapest, phone (36-1) 342-7158.

The present issue of THALASSA was supported by the the National Cultural Fund of the Republic of Hungary.

Kérjük, küldje el véleményét, megjegyzéseit címünkre: thalassa@c3.hu