Editorial

Questions of a natural propensity to altruism in human beings; of the preservation of ‘embryonic self-states’ in patients and of ‘endurance’ in the clinician; and of different forms of guilt are addressed in the first three, searching papers in this issue of the Journal. We continue with a group of wide-ranging papers on the theme of ‘Psychoanalysis and Ethics’. Aspects of the clinical cultures of Australia, the United States and the UK are represented within the section.

In a development of an earlier paper published in the BJP (Music, 2009), Graham Music argues that psychoanalytic thinking ‘might have underestimated the role of altruism as a natural feature of human development’, and that we need to ‘re-establish the fact that being kind and caring is also part of human nature, and also has a place in psychoanalytic psychotherapy’. Recognizing that Freud's view was, broadly, that human beings are ‘naturally self-interested, drive-driven, destructive and aggressive’, Music uses findings from neuroscience, attachment and developmental research on the capacity for empathy and altruism, in a most nuanced way, to argue this different position. Two vignettes from work with patients whose very difficult backgrounds had inclined them to brittle, unfeeling negativity illustrate the type of change that may become possible when this shift of conceptual perspective is held in mind.

The late Nina Farhi believed that the level of disturbance in her patients - individuals ‘who had survived near impossible emotional and psychological circumstances’ - could not be treated or theorized ‘within the psychoanalytic orthodoxy of her time’. Jean White authoritatively locates the evolution of Farhi's clinical thought, with its ‘continual emphasis on unconscious resourcefulness in the service of psychic survival’, in the tradition of Marion Milner and Winnicott, but with its own, particular development in the area of intersubjectivity. White scrupulously assesses Farhi's three major papers