Editorial

This September issue of the Journal begins with the second part of Sue Austin's ‘Working with chronic and relentless self-hatred, self-harm and existential shame: a clinical study and reflections’, part one of which was published in this year's February issue. The present article, based on a 14-year analysis with a highly self-destructive patient, ‘builds on the understanding of self-hatred developed in the earlier paper and applies it to shame’. Austin conducts a thorough review of the subject and the surprising dearth of shame studies in the analytic literature. Her article helps fill this gap and is, essentially, a meditation on shame. Austin utilizes the work of Jung, Laplanche, Kilbourne and Hultberg, among others, in a pluralistic effort to further understand this most crushing of feeling states in her patient, whose shame was in part derived from her complex internalization of her father, a ‘disappointed’ migrant.

Gretchen Heyer's ‘Race, religion and a cat in the clinical hour’ also raises shame issues, particularly their manifestations in the grim racial history of the United States and in both the separate and collective psyches of Heyer herself (a Caucasian analyst) and her African-American patient. She refers, critically, to Jung's racial attitudes and fears and to similar assumptions and ‘micro-aggressions’ that unconsciously permeate American history as well as present-day black-white relations. Racial conflict and history are, she feels, inevitably present in countertransference and transference. Her paper addresses some of the mutual hostilities, misunderstandings and struggles of her 17-year work with a patient where issues of difference and similarity played out in both defensive and transformative ways.

Vladimir Tsivinsky also addresses socio-political and historical factors and how they manifested in his work with an anxious patient, specifically in the form of collectivistic, ‘totalitarian objects’ and cultural complexes that are deeply rooted, and