Editorial

Images have a particular way of communicating with us emotionally, on a ‘gut-level’. Through identification with archetypal, larger-than-life, figures and their stories, we are moved to instinctive empathy and sympathy or the opposites, denial and revulsion. Each of the excellent papers in this edition contains this power to move, describing in various ways how the overwhelming experiences of people's psychic worlds are powerfully communicated in and around the therapeutic setting.

This collection begins with three papers which were presented at the 2008 BAP Conference, introduced by Anna Sladden. She describes how the film Rhythm Is It!, which depicts a group of deprived youngsters being transformed into dancers, helped to generate the conference theme, ‘Rhythm and Response: The Dance of Psychotherapy’.

Ann Horne's conference paper, ‘Rhythm, blues, affirmation and enactment: It's tough soloing without a rhythm section’, is the first of these. It takes us into the world of her young patient, ‘Robertson’, who is at the centre of a web of professionals which unwittingly repeats many of the features of neglect which have marred his life. The paper shows how Ann Horne maintained a psychoanalytic perspective whilst being caught in the web herself.

Stan Ruszczynski's conference paper ‘Dangerous rhythms: The despairing dance between fusion and abandonment’ (renamed for publication: ‘Becoming neglected: A perverse relationship to care’) follows, with an exploration of a highly disturbing countertransference response to two adult, ‘forensic or anti-social personality disordered’ patients whose experiences of abuse and neglect had been, perhaps, similar to those of ‘Robertson’. Stan Ruszczynski describes becoming the object of their ‘identification with the neglector’.

Helen Morgan's conference paper, ‘Frozen harmonies: Petrified places in the analytic field’, again takes us to disturbing countertransference experiences. In one seemingly ‘frozen’ case she laments:

I wish I could s