Editorial

This is a special themed issue on Gender Identity. It brings together a collection of papers from the ACP 2008 Annual Conference, with a guest contribution by Dr Domenico Di Ceglie on gender identity disorder (GID) entitled ‘Engaging young people with atypical gender identity development in therapeutic work: a developmental approach’. Di Ceglie's specialist experience in offering a GID service offers a broad overview and he highlights some of the service management issues. He puts forward the view that when working with the children and families of GID, focusing on keeping the developmental process open is more productive than only focusing on the GID itself. An assessment period reveals the degree to which the desire to belong to the opposite gender is a wish or a powerful belief with important consequences for outcome and whether or not gender reassignment is pursued.

Jenny Sprince's illuminating article, ‘The devil and the deep blue sea: dyadic narcissism and the problem of individuation,’ explores issues of infantile gender identifications with a specific focus on ‘gender narcissism’ and the impact this can have on bisexual and triadic functioning. Sprince draws on her in-depth understanding of group processes amongst adolescents and their carers, gained through her therapeutic and consultation work in institutional settings, and she illustrates her themes with material from this work. She discusses the ideas of ‘dyadic narcissism’ and ‘phallic narcissism’, how these are linked to particular constructions of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, and how these in turn are linked to sado-masochism.

The next article is ‘Exposed: phallic protections, shame and damaged parental objects’, by Simon Cregeen. Cregeen discusses the ‘phallic state of mind’, which may be turned to as a form of psychic survival in the face of catastrophic experience and anxieties. This article links particularly well with the previous one in its exploration of ‘phallic narcissism’, and indeed both auth