Editorial

Since the December 2024 conference issue of the journal on The Perverse Organisation: Turning a Blind Eye to Sexual Violence, the IAFP has held it's thirty-third conference in the magnificent city of Sydney, focused on Locating the Disturbance in Violent Offending: Self, System, Society. Every day in the news, we hear and read of more violence, and in the past six months we have all witnessed our fragile world further deteriorate into a manifest global “borderline” state, one trying to defend its “ego” structures while oscillating between integration and fragmentation. Different nations have been regressing into “paranoid–schizoid” functioning evincing highly polarised ways of seeing adversaries and allies. Cycles akin to a collective repetition compulsion, i.e. replaying trauma of past conflicts, leads to an escalation of acting out with explosive confrontations and horrific violence. Many regions are caught up in the transgenerational traumas of war. Manic defence responses abound in the shape of frantic resource grabs and escalatory militarism and desperate attempts at unifications such as Weimar+ or China–Russia, could be understood as defences against uncertainty. Looking ahead, stability hinges on whether global actors can enter “depressive positions”—tolerating ambiguity and integrating their shadows—rather than defaulting to splitting, projection, and destructive symbiosis.

Never has it seemed so hard to maintain our position of trying to rehumanise the dehumanised, working with our patients and prisoners, when the global backdrop is so infested by violence.

In this issue, the first article by Annie Pesskin brings us back to our true roots in the womb where it all begins and how we can contribute to making it better again. Having listened attentively to talks at the IAFP day conference in March 2025, Shadows, Projections and Embodied Roles, Pesskin draws a powerful parallel: just as the placenta forms a biological bridge between mother and foetus, therapy, and