Editorial

The policy of the Journal is to provide as wide a spread of interesting material on psychoanalytical psychotherapy as possible. With this overall policy we can therefore include a curiosity like the plea for a reinstatement of Incest which, in the view reported by the French journalist Isobel Domon, is a much maligned activity! It is certainly refreshing to have stated what everyone knows is a profoundly sensual and sexual quality in the contact with the bodies of infants and young children.

Cecilia Clementel-Jones also dwells on an apparent gap in awareness, at least in the literature. She draws attention to the paucity of writing on the experience of being pregnant as a therapist. The pregnant therapist is well known as a phantasy of the patient. What happens when such phantasies meet an obliging reality that confirms them? This is an intensely important area of interest - the boundary between intrapsychic reality (phantasy) and the actual interpersonal (external) reality.

The interpersonal world is no more evident than in large groups, and the furiously chaotic events need urgent space for therapists to recover themselves. Pullen describes in a commendably placid way his work with staff groups, largely untrained in matters unconscious but frighteningly zealous to be therapeutic. The avid wish to therapise and the particular fearfulness of the large group make an explosive mixture, which Pullen dissects calmly and sensitively.

The effective working of the staff team is also the focus of Maurice White's paper on working with delinquent and perverse criminals in a therapeutic community. The defensiveness of the staff in confronting the sadistic and perverse transference that arise and that are acted out in the community, is, he claims, the focus of the most vital therapeutic effort. His aim, in the staff seminars he holds, is to enable the staff to resist being drawn into either sadistic reaction, or excited identifications; and to bring these personal reactions into a