Editorial

Salomon Resnik dwells on the meaning of crisis as a moment of truth. He is concerned to distinguish the positive aspects of crisis from catastrophes. And indeed he makes the point that his therapeutic endeavour is to help the psychotic to make the distinction between these two experiences, because it is part of psychotic life to anticipate catastrophe as a part of every intrapsychic change.

Marco Chiesa describes pregnancy similarly as a crisis, one that threatens some extreme distress. In the case he presents, the catastrophe has a form, unlike the raw and ungraspable sense of catastrophe that Resnick discovers in his psychotics. The pregnant woman uses the foetus inside as an internal object that makes concrete the worst fears about dangerous internal objects. Chiesa showed that, because of the focus of crisis in the limited period of pregnancy, it was possible to conduct an effective therapy in a similarly time-limited period. For the pregnant woman, the evidence of the actual object inside her is almost a realisation of the actually unthinkable.

The actually unthinkable does sometimes in fact occur in external reality. Monica Lanyado describes two children who were subjected to actual experiences of this kind. She describes the critical counter-transference helplessness, and the need to meet this with a containing ‘maternal reverie’.

Herbert Hahn delineates the concepts of transference and counter-transference from a theoretical point of view and a Kleinian perspective. He then illustrates with clinical material selected from three separate settings, an analytical psychotherapy, student counselling and career guidance. He shows that attention to the therapist/counsellor's awareness of the atmosphere (counter-transference) in each setting is central to understanding the problem.

The model of the counter-transference as a container for the transference is taken up by myself from the patient's point of view. The activity of the therapist is assessed by the patient in t