Editorial

Welcome to the third issue of Volume 40, which begins with a paper by Mehravar Javid, Fatemeh Talebi, Kainaz Patravala, Serene Kaggal, Daniella Diaz, and Arghavan Ansariannazari. ‘Dreams under Institutional Influence: A Relational Psychoanalytic Case Study of Trauma’ describes work with a 19-year-old Iranian woman whose dreams were a focus of the therapeutic process. The authors assert that dreams offer a unique opportunity to access dissociated affect, internal conflict, and the relational patterns that shape psychic life. The patient’s dreams included vivid imagery of mermaids, suspended fetuses, and scenes of exposure. The authors suggest that this reflected the interplay between trauma and shame, as well as the internalization of institutional forces such as familial authority, religious norms, and educational discipline. The intersubjective, collaborative exploration of these dreams by patient and therapist is thought to have improved symbolization, affect tolerance, and integration of fragmented self-states. The authors conclude that dream interpretations, situated within a trauma-informed and relational framework, can metabolize unformulated experience into narrative meaning and help patients to reclaim psychic agency in the face of institutional and cultural constraint.

Our second article, by Eli Somer, transports us from dreams to daydreaming. His article, entitled ‘Transitional relating in maladaptive daydreaming: intersession fantasies about the therapist’, explores aspects of how the patient represents and relates to their therapist as an object in their internal world. Somer draws on the Winnicottian concept of transitional phenomena to consider how the patient may make use of their therapist in phantasy between therapy sessions. He suggests that such intersession phantasies are common but rarely examined clinically. Typical accounts have emphasised how patients can make use of internalised aspects of their therapist to manage episodes of psychic stress.