Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of the Journal for 2024, which begins with a research article by Klaus Reininger, Hannah Biel, Timo Hennig, Steffen Moritz, Peer Briken and Bernd Löwe entitled ‘Testing Heinz Kohut’s thoughts on narcissism and narcissistic rage: narcissistic injury paves the way for radicalization and subclinical paranoid states – an experimental study’. The authors identified a situation in Germany that would enable them to conduct research into the consequences of narcissistic injury. In 2019 German authorities began implementing a structural reform of psychotherapy training, with only a brief period of transition for those who were mid-training during the reforms. The authors conducted a randomised controlled experiment in which 100 psychology students were allocated to either a group that read information about how the short transition period would affect their own path to qualification as psychotherapists (experimental condition), or to a group that read about how the short transition period would affect education students hoping to qualify as child and adolescent psychotherapists (control condition). Both groups then also read the views of a professor who believed that effective, immediate action would be necessary to overturn the proposed short transition periods (a radicalization prompt). Following a 30 minute group discussion, participants in both conditions completed dependent measures of separatist identification, negative affects, overconfidence, radical intentions and subclinical paranoid states. Compared to the control condition, psychologists in the experimental condition experienced greater narcissistic injury. They experienced a stronger alloyance with an archaic omnipotent object, exhibited more negative affects, claimed overconfidence, more radical intentions and subclinical paranoid states. The authors suggest that these results support Kohut’s idea that narcissistic injuries can lead to antisocial and/or paranoid states mediated by the