Editorial

Across the world today, public discourse is saturated with accounts of violence, coercion, and the manipulation of reality—phenomena that, while often framed as political or social crises, are equally matters of psychic life. We witness governments weaponising disinformation, families torn apart by ideological polarisation, and children increasingly exposed to forms of emotional and symbolic violence that leave no physical trace—social platforms, AI, the internet—yet shape their development profoundly. The contemporary landscape is one in which truth itself has become contested terrain, and the erosion of shared reality has begun to resemble, at a societal level, the very dynamics forensic psychotherapists encounter in the consulting room and in institutions.

Against this backdrop, the articles in this issue speak with particular urgency. They remind us that the roots of violence—whether enacted by states, families, or individuals—are fundamentally psychological, and that the collapse of reality-testing, empathy, and symbolic capacity begins not in parliaments or police stations but in homes, attachments, and early relational environments.

Brett Kahr's article confronts a disturbing but under-recognised phenomenon: the murder of pets, literal and symbolic, as a displaced form of infanticidal attack. His six clinical cases show how parents who cannot tolerate their children's dependency or vitality may direct annihilatory impulses towards the animals those children love. In a cultural moment increasingly attentive to non-physical forms of harm, Kahr's work underscores that cruelty towards animals can constitute a direct assault on a child's psychic foundations, precipitating psychosis, dissociation, and lifelong vulnerability.

Massimo De Mari's contribution examines the defensive illusion of normality constructed by children forced to adapt to abusive or neglectful care-givers. In an era when public conversations increasingly acknowledge the long-term effects of childho