Editor's Report

Structure is perceived through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and the fragility of its existence.

A short hike through woods on a hot morning revealed what looked at first to be just a cleft in the ground, a slight variation in topography remarkable only for the network of cables secured to trees and rocks. A single rope dropped into the earth opening. This was not a duck-your-head-and-walk-into type of cave. Bumping and scuffing through the rocky opening and descending down a deep vertical pit, the light narrowed to shadows indistinguishable from rock. There are places we are told we shouldn't go — guarded, sometimes secret places. Other spaces seem forbidden because they offer a challenge — to the status quo, or to the limits of what is acceptable or endurable. Inside the cave network, I chose to stay behind in a small chamber while others squeezed through a fissure choked with boulders seeking another chamber a short climb away. In a short time the others disappeared completely. A moment later, with all light extinguished, the absolute darkness and silence felt something like the emptiness of the Winnicottian baby enduring the dread of aloneness and “nothing happening” for too long.

It is unusual to be somewhere where straining one's eyes (and ears) open as far as possible still won't yield a wavelength of light or sound. Although unfamiliar, this kind of darkness did not feel like “being in the dark” in the sense that things could not be known. The absence felt alive, unstable, almost sinister because, I think, the cave environment felt inhospitable — the terrestrial equivalent of a dirge. Dread related to dying, writes Winnicott (1974), occurs when our continuity of being is interrupted and impinged upon by ruptures in the facilitating environment. It is not surprising t