Editorial

Historical and contemporary perspectives are richly represented in this issue of the Journal, allowing for a dialectical movement between analytic present and analytic past. The issue opens with three papers in our regular Clinical Practice strand, locating us imaginatively in present-day concerns.

Graham Music explores situations in which the individual is ‘out of touch with their bodily states’, making use of Winnicott's work on psyche-soma and Porges'work on vagal tone and the parasympathetic nervous system. Written in Music's characteristically compassionate voice, this challenging paper asks whether bodily informed work will still be called psychoanalytic psychotherapy. As he suggests, ‘Good psychological understanding and interpretation can sometimes lead to a calming of … aroused bodily states, but … sometimes a more active use of body awareness might also be an important part of therapeutic change.’

Retaining the engagement with Winnicott and starting with Freud's foundational work on interpretation and construction, Fadi Abou-Rihan proposes that construction is not merely one tool among many, but is ‘the very means and end of the psychoanalytic experience’. Following Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, he notes that ‘production, rather than representation or communication, is the fundament of human existence’. Through two detailed vignettes he incisively examines the ‘constructions of themselves’ - or, one might say, the production of themselves - that two patients offer. He notes, further, that the analyst's construction is an intervention that is, among other things, ‘an interference, a rupture, a tear’; one that allows for generative construction, bringing about ‘further associations, interpretations and, indeed, constructions that reshape the subject’.

As Mark J. Goldblatt, Stephen Briggs and Reinhard Lindner note, ‘group suicidal behaviour by young people has been attracting increasing worldwide attention, but the subject has rarely been studied from a c