Editorial

This issue of the Journal continues the exploration of the work of Armando B. Ferrari. We open with Richard Carvalho's masterly overview of Ferrari's work, following Paolo Carignani's consideration of ‘the body in psychoanalysis’ in the previous issue. Carvalho suggests that Ferrari's approach, which postulates a ‘direct relationship between body and mind’ that is in contrast to the object relations model ‘in which this relationship is mediated through the breast’, offers ‘an important avenue of approach’ to the treatment of psychosis, psychosomatic illness and anorexia. This last provides a link with the paper on anorexia and bulimia by Fausta Romano which is presented in the next issue of the Journal, and which will conclude our series. Laying out Ferrari's terminology (Concrete Original Object, vertical axis, horizontal axis, as denoting specific relationships between body, mind, and external world) Carvalho compares Ferrari's conceptual framework with Bion's. He goes on to show how the subject's ‘direct’ rather than mediated apperception of the ‘sensational and emotional life of his body’ has implications for the centrality of transference interpretation, without in any way dispensing with the idea of transference as ubiquitous; he develops this position with a rich illustration from his own clinical work.

Clinicians with a psychosocial perspective have had a longstanding interest in the relationship between culture and eating disorders in women, perhaps young women in particular. Yael A. Kadish rightly recognizes the importance of engagement with this debate, and carefully integrates a body of literature coming from feminist scholars and commentators, and critical social theorists, on the one hand, with John Steiner's work on pathological organizations and psychic retreats, on the other. She develops her argument with new conceptual terms that are intended to situate psychic experience within a framework of imposed norms, a ‘taxonomy of social desirability’. Usi