Editor's Comments

As another volume of the BJP is completed, it is a pleasure to note the trends that we are seeing. The number of original submissions has increased by approximately 40% in the last year. This increase is paralleled by a comparable increase in the number of peer reviewers whose expertise we have called on, and whose names are acknowledged, with our appreciation, in this issue. A higher proportion of our peer reviewers in the last twelve months have come from organizations that are represented on the Board of the BJP or who have been recommended to us by our longstanding reviewers; we hope that this development adds to the coherence and robustness of our clinical and conceptual framework. In addition, the proportion of international submissions continues to rise, something that we have seen since the BJP went into PEPweb nearly three years ago. This welcome trend is perhaps illustrated in the diverse provenance of the papers in this issue.

In a wide-ranging, scholarly study of ‘Janet vs Freud’ on traumatization - the theory of structural dissociation vs a psychoanalytic model of the mind - Joan Lesley and Sverre Varvin (Oslo) argue that ‘both the conceptualization of the human being and the understanding of traumatization and treatment’ differ in the two models. Through complex clinical examples, they show how an alternative, ‘uniquely individual understanding of the patient is achieved by following the transference and countertransference that must necessarily determine the direction of the therapeutic process’. Massimiliano Sommantico (Naples) addresses unconscious communication within the couple, especially through the means of dreams. As he says, ‘a dream in couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy reveals individual states of mind, but at the same time it expresses a joint psychic organization’. The patients are a married couple in their early forties, with four children, the eldest of whom has Down's syndrome. Rooted in a survey of different theoretical approaches to