Editorial

The peculiarly unreachable area of the body-mind boundary is the topic of two papers in this issue. Robin Royston tackles the disputed territory of the causation of schizophrenia. He joins the recent trend towards finding common ground between the biological genetics and the psychological factors. He finds the unifying factor in Jung's archetypes, and Jung's ideas on the relation between the unconscious and physiological processes.

In an intriguing contrast Dennis Brown's paper includes the social aspect of human beings. If they are bio-psycho-social entities he postulates the arresting idea that it is the social aspect that can most enlighten the mysteries of the boundary between the biological and the psychic. If that boundary is one which has to be crossed by a movement from non-symbolic to symbolic forms of communication, then it is the entry of the human being into the social world that drives the transition from biological to psychological being. So what is the proper image of man? Psycho-somatic or biopsycho-social? Jonathan Pedder explores a series of much more poetic images of mankind, particularly the centaur. And Hazel Guest charts the historical progress in psychotherapy from behavioural to psychoanalytic, to humanistic and eventually towards claiming a spiritual dimension as a key element in psychotherapy. This fourth force, transpersonal psychology, she describes as reaching beyond the humanism of humanistic psychology to a higher spiritual domain.

Gail Yariv reflects in her paper on the very fundamental place that respect for, or violation of, boundaries has in human experiences. Her essay reviews the psychological level of this essential developmental step that is so close to the physical properties of the human body. In a related vein the experience of the other person as a subject who also experiences, and the boundary with them has led Robert Hobson to develop his conversational model of psychotherapy; and Michael Barkham has extended this model to