Editorial

IN THIS ISSUE …

For analyses that get stuck or reach impasse, new theoretical input is helpful. Richard Carvalho offers an alternative view to Steiner's psychic retreat in which the issue is not defences against primitive aggression but rather an overwhelming fear of uncontained affect due to attachment failures from the past. After linking in the ideas of Ferrari and Matte Blanco, Carvalho discusses the technical implications of these considerations in relation to some of the clinical material from Steiner's paper, ‘Containment, enactment and communication’.

Patients with a sense of entitlement are often encountered in clinical practice. Jackie Gerrard explores this topic, taking as her starting point Freud's paper ‘The Exceptions’ and bringing in the ideas of Rosenfeld, Kohut, Britton, Mollon and Main. She differentiates between the underlying configurations of narcissistic injury, deprivation and privation, with implications for technique.

In Ibsen's Peer Gynt trolls become human beings by finding themselves through being loved.

Irene Freeden gives excerpts from the analyses of two female patients showing their struggles and transformations, using the concept of the Claustrum espoused by Meltzer and Bion's ideas of alpha function, Love, Hate and Knowledge to illustrate psychopathology and what did and didn't change.

Successive intermittent psychotherapy over the patient's life-span is already practised in our profession, as pointed out by Gertrud Mander, who goes on to propose an appropriate brief therapy in which free association gives way to active focusing on the central dynamic conflict. She cites the work of Mann, Balint, Malan, Luborsky and Stern. After current therapeutic goals are reached the patient then has the opportunity to return later when new crises occur, thus shortening the therapy contract.

The supervision group is widely used in the training of psychodynamic counsellors and psychotherapists. Christopher Scanlon writes of the group dynamics that help