{"title":"Issue Information - Cover and Editorial Board","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12904","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bjp.12904","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defensive care","authors":"Ricardo Readi","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12975","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This work consists of an approach to the concept of Social Defences, which consolidates one way of applying psychoanalytic thinking to human institutionality. The author briefly describes the path psychoanalytic theory takes towards the outline of this concept, to emphasise later the implications it has for health institutions. There is a statement about the importance of considering the ways in which individual defences tend to collude with the institutionalized group's unconscious mechanisms, where certain conditions will be determined for the containment of primitive states of mind. Emphasis is made about the possibility that these dynamics have concrete effects on the workers' capacities and health, on the patients' treatment, and mainly on the loss of meaning that these people experience in their link with this institution. Two vignettes are included to attempt an illustration of these dynamics.</p>","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"384-394"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Out of sight, out of mind? Working with separation and risk when patients are away from the hospital","authors":"Sarah Miell, Simmi Protab","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12969","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Risk management in all institutions can become unthinking and process-led, and in this paper we, as psychosocial nurses, have sought to convey how we think about risk at weekends for our patients at the Cassel Hospital. In contrast to many mental health inpatient settings, inpatients at the Cassel go home for the weekend. On one hand, this supports the development of their responsibility for themselves and their social relationships, and on the other, it raises difficulties around separation. These two aspects present us with questions around how to manage risk when patients are not in the hospital. We took as our starting point formal discussions with our inpatient group and nurse team, and linked the ideas that emerged from those discussions with ideas from former members of Cassel staff, drawing on psychoanalytic and psychosocial theories. A dominant theme that emerged was the existence of two selves in the patients' minds – their home self and their Cassel self, and the anxiety shared by patients and nurses about how these two selves can become integrated. Such learning can inform practitioners and policy makers interested in creating services that use relational practice as well as trauma-informed care. These principles could be considered applicable also to health, social care and criminal justice systems.</p>","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"371-383"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oedipus and Narcissus: Brothers in defeat?","authors":"Ralph Holtom, Gilly Stiffell","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12980","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper looks at those resolutions of the Oedipal situation that are characterised as defeat or triumph. We argue that both are defeats and the situation best resolves when intergenerational rivalry is contained and supportive co-operation is dominant. We are struck by the Narcissistic quality we find especially in triumph and note that Oedipus and Narcissus both lived in a false reality constructed to avoid the shame of their own rejection. We are especially concerned about what happens when the child builds a life based on either defeating or being defeated by the same-sex parent and how this appears and may find resolution in analytic psychotherapy. We consider the situation for the girl as well as for the boy and feel there are important distinctions that warrant further thought. Anonymised clinical material is provided to exemplify how this may play out in life and in our practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"560-573"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mark J. Goldblatt, Elsa Ronningstam, Reinhard Lindner
{"title":"Some post-pandemic considerations of the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on remote treatment of suicidal patients","authors":"Mark J. Goldblatt, Elsa Ronningstam, Reinhard Lindner","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12978","url":null,"abstract":"<p>During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, important changes were made to the psychotherapeutic process whereby remote treatments became normalised and suicidal distress was communicated from afar. We consider lessons that may be learnt from this experience about the communication of suicidal desperation and engaging the distressed patient through remote mechanisms.</p>","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"550-559"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to papers from the Cassel Hospital Summer Conference 2024","authors":"Sally Arthur","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12977","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"349-351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Violent exigencies emanating from primitive mental states","authors":"Timothy Keogh","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12979","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Originally psychoanalytic understandings concerning the capacity to tolerate otherness were linked to the concept of narcissism. Freud (1914) had originally identified a protective stage of ‘objectless’ primary narcissism in normal development and a secondary narcissism, which involves a withdrawal of attachment to the external object. Recent theoretical understandings have identified very early stages of development, known as primitive mental states, wherein the other is both poorly differentiated and psychically represented, leading to unique anxieties and defences. I wish to demonstrate how in working with such states of mind associated violent exigencies can emerge, which if not identified and carefully managed, can stymie psychic growth. In managing such exigencies, it is proposed that the therapist needs to be available to the patient as what Bick has termed a ‘complex undifferentiated object’. This leads to a way of navigating the point at which the patient can suddenly switch from a desperate need for such an object, to a fear of being annihilated by it. In this process, the value of identifying primitive anxieties through one's somatic countertransference experiences is highlighted, as is the utility of a continuum of developmental anxieties, initially proposed by Ogden (1989), which can be used as a therapeutic compass in such a clinical landscape. Two case vignettes are presented which demonstrate how the presence of the therapist moved from being imperative to the patient's survival to being potentially annihilating, and how this was worked with to facilitate psychic growth.</p>","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"534-549"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bjp.12979","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evolution of psychoanalytic approaches to somatic disorders","authors":"Jaime Yasky","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12974","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Initially, Freud proposed two distinctive ways of understanding somatic symptoms: the hysterical conversion and the actual neuroses models. The original conversion model posited that somatic symptoms had meaning and resulted from psychic mechanisms, whereas actual neuroses model proposed somatic symptoms had no meaning and resulted from physiological rather than psychic processes. Psychoanalytic psychosomatics has evolved much since those initial postulates. Insufficiencies in psychic processing of emotional experience has become a key problem for the understanding of somatic symptoms, and consequently supporting psychic processing has become the main technical challenge. Starting from Freud, this paper explores the evolution of explanatory models and technical approaches for the treatment of people affected by so-called ‘psychosomatic’ pathology. Some technical implications of these developments are discussed in relation to a case example.</p>","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"516-533"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bjp.12974","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘The mothering instinct’ and Bion: The importance of the link between curiosity and love in the ability to nurture emotional growth","authors":"David Simpson","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12973","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper the author explores the emerging model of maternal care which Bion uses to understand analytic function and attitude. Inspired by Bion, he suggests that both curiosity and love are important for mothering capacity in nurturing emotional growth, both in childcare and in analytic work. In his view, of central importance in both of these is the strength of the links to the father or paternal figure. He considers that Bion struggled with a problem in his earlier analytic work, illustrated in his paper ‘On Arrogance’, that followed his prioritisation of curiosity, of seeking knowledge, over its emotional impact. The author suggests that Bion's later change towards a focus on the growth of Being (O), and his recommendations regarding the analyst's attitude, namely a disciplined suspension of memory and desire during psychoanalytic sessions, were aimed at addressing this problem, bringing Bion into line with Klein and Freud.</p>","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"502-515"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trauma, Psychoanalysis and History by Luis Sanfelippo. Published by Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2024. 262 pp; £130.00 (Hardback) £33.99 (paperback), £28.89 (Ebook)","authors":"Neil Morgan","doi":"10.1111/bjp.12972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12972","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54130,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Psychotherapy","volume":"41 3","pages":"591-593"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}