Guest Editorial

I was recently invited to write a review on a new outstanding book called ‘Karl Abraham - Life and Work, a Biography’, just published by Karnac. Apart from being ‘treated to a real “master class” in history, theory, and technique’ (Kahr, 2016, p. xvii) of the earliest period of psychoanalysis, the book illuminates Abraham's views on the issue of ambivalence in early childhood; views that set the course for the advance of object relations theory. The author catches it, ‘In fact Abraham spent all his psychoanalytic working life expanding and refining his theory on depression’ (Bentinck van Schoonheten, 2016, p. 153). These theories were not entirely reconciled with Freud's concept of the death instinct, and it was for Melanie Klein, an analysand of Abraham's, to elaborate how the vicissitudes in object relations harnessed the aggression inherently supplied by the death instinct. So, it is quite a synchronous occasion that I should also have been invited to write this editorial on sexual oppression, a term that encapsulates the coniunctio of the life and death instincts as manifest in a range of individual and social contexts. And this edition considers sexual oppression from the perspective of both the psychology of the individual and of the psycho-social context in which it takes place.

One such highly publicised social context is highlighted in the first paper, ‘Supporting Survivors: A Strategic Model to Address Rape Culture in Universities’. Shariff and Wiseman describe, with some disturbing evidence, the ‘rape culture’ that seems to pervade university campuses, at least in North America. Although the authors acknowledge that sexist attitudes probably develop prior to university age they argue that this should only strengthen the resolve of universities to dismantle the social discourses that maintain such views. They point out the devastating effects on student performance and psychological well-being of victims and perpetrators and yet the paucity of concerted pol