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Pivoting adroitly on a clinical case as harrowing as any we have encountered, Carl Goldberg opens this Journal issue challenging conventional wisdom about criminality. Goldberg disputes the view that the irremediable nature of criminal psychology has its genesis in an infantile deprivation and trauma so early and so profound, the force of repression so compelling, that the chance of therapeutic benefit is woefully slim. In his experience, the criminally destructive person has ample awareness of his own early childhood deprivation. What such a person lacks, however, is a recognition of the resulting emotional strategies, as Goldberg terms them, and the considerable limitations in self-awareness and freedom that result. These adverse consequences generated to deal with early injuries to development are more available to exploration and amelioration than is commonly believed. Turning on its head the way this matter is usually contemplated, Goldberg contends that repression and other defenses operate with the consent of the conscious mind. Regardless of whether we are persuaded, Goldberg's argument is thoughtful and scholarly. He toils in the humanistic tradition in psychoanalysis, one the readership of this Journal is likely to especially value. Additionally, his management of a chalkboard-screeching ethical dilemma is amply worthy of our attention, even our emulation.
Veering off in a different psychoanalytic tradition, yet likewise concerned with the sequelae of early childhood deprivation, Marilyn Charles continues with Part II of her consideration of images of emptiness—this time in men. In the immediately preceding issue of this Journal, she explored images of emptiness in women. Poetical and imaginative, and drawing from an object relations perspective, Charles emphasizes that the absence of a responsive early holding environment is felt as a profound void which, internalized, becomes an internal void, an emptiness. As Charles described earlier, this feeling of em