Editorial

In this second issue of 2017 the Journal takes up an intriguing range of cases and subjects. Of course, every patient and every case study is unique, but the first three articles presented here display a particularly diverse range of clinical contexts. Different theoretical approaches and different ages, stages and even political situations are presented, all of which deal with traumatic loss and internal fragmentation. After these quite detailed papers, the issue branches out in other historical and theoretical directions.

Alessandra Cavalli's ‘Identification - obstacle to individuation, or: on how to become “me”’ shows her close work with a three-year-old boy in weekly therapy. Early loss, in a boy who in effect had ‘not yet developed a mind’, led to a defensive identification and fusion state that Cavalli sometimes found herself caught up in and then worked through in complex transference-countertransference states. Her participatory and interpretive modes assist her patient in negotiating the intense, unconscious and acted-out affects bound up in identification with a lost object, an identification that blocked individuation.

From a different Jungian perspective, Brian Weber's ‘Psychological implications of a vision disorder’ focuses quite literally on attachment problems in an adult patient traumatized by esotropia (crossed eyes), with resulting double vision and multiple surgeries from a very young age. What could seem almost like plays on words - ‘mirroring’ difficulties, ‘blind spots’ - in fact represent precisely the conjunction of the psychological and the physical. An ‘unstable visual environment’ is isomorphic with an unstable emotional environment, which patient and therapist approach through attachment theory, and alchemical and artistic amplifications on the way to sorting out a ‘fusional complex’ and a ‘complexed maternal situation’.

A different level of trauma is represented in Monica Luci's multi-modal work with a refugee, a war- and torture-survivor,