Editorial

I am pleased to bring you the first volume for 2014 of the Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy. In it are offered four diverse papers, several book reviews, and an engaging piece considering the Australian television drama Rake.

We are very grateful to Karnac Books for allowing us to reprint a chapter from Estela Welldon’s  2011 work, Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the Psychoanalytic Understanding of Perversions, Violence, and Criminality. Those of you who attended the 2013 PPAA Conference in Sydney will have heard Estela present a form of this chapter, and there were several calls for it to be published here so that it might be savored anew. We are thus delighted that Estela has given us a further opportunity to reflect on her extremely thoughtful discussion of the challenges and  opportunities of working with this complex clinical population.

This paper is followed by Bruce Stevens’ intriguing and very personal essay, in which, viewing the matter from the perspective of self psychology theory, he suggests that the self-analysis of one’s own dreams can provide a kind of selfobject function, shoring up and providing coherence to the self in much the same manner as do empathic interpretations by an attuned psychotherapist.

Barry Jones, a recent migrant to our shores, gives an account of a psychoanalytically informed model of clinical intervention with troubled children and their families, first developed in the UK, within the public health system. This alternative to a strictly behavioral approach, while constrained by budgetary and time considerations, is clearly bearing fruit, and shows how psychoanalytic understanding can be applied in this multifaceted setting where the needs of staff, young patients, and their distressed families are often in conflict. Jones’s case examples are particularly poignant.

Each of the theoretical papers in this volume bears witness to the careful bringing of a  psychoanalytic state of mind — curious, attentive to meanings both intra and inter-psychic — to hard questions concerning perversity and pain, family conflict, and the strange tuggings of the unconscious during dreams.

Allan Shafer reflects on the question in the final paper, of what such a psychoanalytic state of mind might be — is there, he asks, such a thing? His thinking, informed by many strands of psychoanalytic theory, and more importantly, his own long experience of psychoanalytic practice, brings him to the conclusion that there is indeed a particular state of mind — of deep reverie, and a capacity to think about one’s feelings — that embraces both the relational and the interpretive aspects of the encounter with our patients, and is crucial to a mutative dynamic process.

Linking nicely to our splendid cover, by Wendy Castleden, Marilyn Goss reviews The Female Body — Inside and Out and finds it a richly rewarding collection of papers. She is particularly interested in the section exploring infertility, especially that of a psychogenic nature, although she cautions against confusing “the effect of the infertility itself on the mind, as well as the effect of the mind on infertility”.

Paul Coombe offers us an extended review of From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis: The Pioneering Work of Trigant Burrow. Burrow was the founder of the American Psychoanalytic Society and its first (co) president, as well as a forerunner in the area of Group Psychoanalysis. Coombe finds in the book a welcome albeit belated recognition of “an illustrious unknown man” whose work, it is argued, was subject to censorship and envious attack during his lifetime.

Finally, Neil Mazel brings a psychoanalytic take to bear on the popular Australia tragicomic drama Rake, He finds in the film much to amuse, to provoke and to ponder, arguing that “Rake digs deep enough to reveal the vulnerability and frailty that keeps us all digging for … love”.

With thanks to my able reviewers, and to my supportive book review editor, I commend to our readers this edition of Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy, and very much welcome your feedback via letters or emails to the Editor. Do help make this journal a lively forum for “psychoanalytic states of mind”.

Suzanne Hicks | Editor
PO Box 1115, Margaret River