Editorial

Sometimes we compile articles for an issue with a particular subject in mind, such as the Special Issue on Masculinity. But often papers come together without a clear linking theme and it is interesting to try to see in what direction these bright threads might be leading us or what landscape these illuminations of thought might reveal.

We open this issue with a stimulating paper by Bob Hinshelwood considering how our individual and social identities depend on unconscious beliefs about what is inside us. He describes in detail an example of ‘chains of projection’, a process in which an individual emotional state travels through a group and, in so doing, changes from the personal to the institutional. He concludes that, ‘our internal world (identity) and our external world (reality) are under constant reconstruction and change’.

2005 brought the centenary of the publication of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality of which Freud said, ‘Its insistence on the importance of sexuality in all human achievements and the attempt that it makes at enlarging the concept of sexuality has from the first provided the strongest motives for the resistance against psycho-analysis’ (Introduction to 1920 edition). In ‘The Inherent Shame of Sexuality’, Phil Mollon opens his paper by quoting from a sufferer from Tourette's Syndrome and then asks, ‘Why is such speech disturbing, embarrassing - shameful?’ He argues that language and culture are the product of displaced sexuality, the fig-leaves of the symbolic. Society develops from the discourse of shame.

The BJP/Freud Museum conference on 25 March 2006 will be the first in a series under the generic title, ‘Emerging Paradigms in Psychoanalysis’. The conference is entitled, ‘Mentalization: Who Thinks What?’ and will bring together practitioners from different theoretical backgrounds to consider the concept of mentalization in relation to other psychoanalytic models of mental functioning. We shall be publishing the conference paper