Editorial

Dreams are not only the royal road to the unconscious, they are the historical substrate upon which psycho-analysis and the modern understanding of the unconscious itself were founded. 50 years after Freud's death in 1939 the methods of using dreams in psychotherapy remain under discussion; also, of course, academic psychology continues to debate the nature of the dream itself. Mary Brownescombe Heller has reviewed some of the alternative ways that dreams may be conceptualised in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and reviews with a ‘first’ dream the authenticity of this variety of views. Dreams are the original work-bench upon which the psycho-analytic view of symbolism was originally forged. Again this has moved on since the early days. Robert Whyte uses the crucial distinction between two kinds of symbols described by Hanna Segal to understand work with groups, in particular the familiar notion that groups are ‘more psychotic’ than individuals. He illustrates the high prevalence of concrete symbols employed in groups; concrete symbols come from a process of symbolic equation in which the symbol is not separate from the thing symbolised. This failure of separation arises from pathological phantasies of omnipotent relationships (merging) with objects. It is a salutary proposition that the tip towards omnipotent psychotic functioning may be easily provoked simply by being in a group.

The concreteness of symbols is a crucial central to the way in which the therapist is viewed by his patients. David Mann describes some of the complexities in this area when a male therapist confronts an erotic transference in a male patient; and he illustrates the important function of distinguishing the reality of actual homosexual incest from the phantasy in the mind of the patients (the psychotherapist's as well), and the representation (symbolisation) in the transference. This is also exemplified in Michael Lamprell's precise paper on the problems of separation in the early stages of the