This contribution considers a monthly seminar, Literature and Psychoanalysis, that has been taking place at Sofia University (Sofia, Bulgaria) since 2017. Three of the seminar\'s founders reflect on the transferences between literature and psychoanalysis, and on the ways in which literature and psychoanalysis can meaningfully converse. The exchange also touches on the fate of Freud\'s textual legacy in communist and post-communist Bulgaria.

Lacan\'s seminars are a treasure trove of innovative psychoanalytic explorations. In Seminar X, Anxiety, he takes up this Freudian theme and explores a number of interrelated ideas: castration, the difference between the sexes, two different forms of acting out, and what he terms his only original theoretical contribution: the object a and its \"various incidences.\" The object a is described here in detail, especially in relation to Lacan\'s argument that analysts who are women have a freer relationship to their desire and the countertransferences it spawns than do men. Lacan discussed Lucia Tower\'s classic paper, \"Countertransference,\" in light of these notions. This essay is a close reading of Lacan\'s close reading of Tower, whose account, he says, must be approached in all its \"innocence and freshness.\"

This is a brief introduction to Jacques Lacan\'s paper \"Some Reflections on the Ego\" which summarizes his main ideas.

The expression \"postcolonial couch\" is first of all to be understood as an invitation to rethink psychoanalysis beyond the anthropological, epistemological and political categories that saw its birth (the Oedipus complex, sexual difference, etc.). But it must also be understood as a de-fense of psychoanalysis, and more specifically as a defense of the type of listening and care that its unique device, based on the hypothesis of the unconscious, makes possible.

Some of the ideas of Sigmund Freud were preceded in a literary form by the Swedish writer August Strindberg in the late 19th century. Psychoanalysis itself was introduced in Sweden about a decade into the 20th century by two rivalling pioneers, the doctors Emanuel af Geijerstam and Poul Bjerre. After a slow start, the Danish-Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society and the Finnish-Swedish Psychoanalytical Society were formed in 1934 in Stockholm. The same year, Ericastiftelsen [The Erica Foundation], a psychotherapeutic clinic for children, was founded by Hanna Bratt. Five years later, in 1939, also in Stockholm, the organization that was to become St. Lukasstiftelsen [The Saint Luke\'s Foundation] was founded. It has been, and still is, an association that has trained psychodynamic psychotherapists, with a focus on existential, religious and philosophical questions. Today, St. Luke\'s tries to be up-dated from an academic standpoint. During the Second World War, several important psychoanalysts came to Sweden, for example René de Monchy, Lajos and Edith Székely, and Stefi Pedersen. Ola Andersson\'s doctoral dissertation (\"Studies in the Prehistory of Psychoanalysis\", 1962) and the historian Gunnar Brandell\'s essay (\"Freud, a Man of His Century\", 1961) have had an international impact. In the last two decades, an authorized and carefully edited translation of Freud\'s collected works has been published by Natur och Kultur, and the history of psychoanalysis in Sweden has been written at the University of Gothenburg. As a result of a recent interest in the work of Jacques Lacan, and French psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature, the journal Psykoanalytisk Tid/Skrift was founded in 2002, in Gothenburg. Since 2011 the journal is called Arche. The largest organized group of psychoanalysts in Sweden today is the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association (SPAF), which has around 225 members. Since 2008, it no longer has the right to license psychotherapists, a situation which reflects the position of psychoanalysis outside the mainstream of psychiatric health services and academic psychology. Despite the criticism of Freud\'s thinking from biologically and cognitively oriented theoretical standpoints, the interest in psychoanalysis endures.