Editorial

This first issue of 2016 opens with five papers of clinical import, from an international cast of authors. Indeed, the entire issue highlights two key aspects of the Journal - its focus on the specifics of treatment itself and its international scope.

Salvatore Martini of Rome in his paper ‘Embodying analysis’ comes directly to the point: ‘In my clinical practice I often experience bodily disturbances during analytic sessions’. The work is as direct and complex (in all senses) as that. After reviewing and fully incorporating both the defensive and communicative dimensions of embodied countertransference from multiple theoretical standpoints, Martini's case example takes the reader into deeper territory of intensive somatic transference-countertransference processing. By stressing actual bodily experience, mostly of the painful variety, the paper gives full meaning to Jung's statement that countertransference is a ‘highly important organ of information’.

In the next paper, Sue Austin, from Australia, also takes up body-based issues and at an equally deep level, examining her work with a bulimic, self-cutting patient who suffered from relentless feelings of self-hatred and shame. Austin, too, describes how she worked with extremely vivid somatic and imagistic experiences in the countertransference. Like Martini and other analysts today, she draws from a wide range of both Jungian and non-Jungian analytic sources, in her case finding the work of Laplanche especially useful in attempting to understand what is happening in her intense analytic involvements with her patient.

Austin's paper refers to ‘early relational trauma’ and ‘borderline’ functioning, as well as to the Michael Fordham-‘K’-James Astor papers that have been prominently featured in the Journal over the years. Marcus West's ‘Working in the borderland’ takes up these topics and that well-documented analysis in addition, with special emphasis on the difficulties and dangers in working with traumatized patients