Abolishing the Captivity of a Tyrannized Woman: Evidence of Bion's Concept of the Contact-Barrier as Manifested in Dreams.

Bion's notion of the contact-barrier formulates a semipermeable membrane responsible for preserving the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. However, the question of how a newly established contact-barrier manifests itself in dreams remains unanswered. The author proposes that one such manifestation occurs when a patient sees themself asleep in a dream. A case of a severely traumatized woman who had difficulty thinking and being close to others is used to explore these clinical ideas. The author, in response to his reveries in a session, introduced a playful dream-like dialogue between a playwright and his reader. The nature of the communication, in functioning as a barrier, served to protect the patient from a tyrannizing reality: the therapist's sexuality. This intersubjective barrier helped the patient to contact dissociated and damaged parts of herself, and it also facilitated her ability to dream a sense of her own boundaries, femininity, and sexuality.

A Case of a Survivor of a Suicide Bomb Attack and Winnicott's "Survival of Destruction".

The author discusses Winnicott's concept of the use of an object, illustrating how it was used in the case of a woman who survived a suicide bomb attack that killed four people. The author as analyst extends Winnicott's and Ogden's ideas by demonstrating in his clinical work that the therapist must survive the patient's unconscious omnipotent belief that her love kills and must maintain his capacity for reverie. The therapist not only has to recover from the pain inflicted by the patient's demand for love, he must also change in response to the feeling of having been destroyed. In the case presented, in order for the process of survival to become real for the patient, the therapist had to discover about himself that he unconsciously shared a common reality with the patient-he, too, was experiencing features of a silenced survivor and experienced an identification with the oppressor.

On Reverie and Independence.

The author presents a detailed clinical discussion of his work with a forty-year-old man and a ten-year-old boy in which he focuses on loss of self-object differentiation in the transference-countertransference experiences while he and these two patients were working with tyrannical internal objects (arising from in-tergenerationally transmitted trauma). In both of the analytic psychotherapies, the author experiences reveries in which a benevolent paternal figure lovingly supports a child's quest for independence. These reveries are of help to the therapist in recognizing, acknowledging, and accepting the need on the part of both patients to emancipate themselves from unconscious tyrannizing internal objects. The patients had previously experienced their need for emancipation as destructive to their parents and themselves, and consequently too dangerous to attempt.

The Devolution of Melancholia Into Psychosis: The Case of a Child Whose Mother Was Unable to Grieve.

The author explores the intersubjective aspect of the devolution of melancholia into psychosis, particularly as it involves the unconscious intersubjective role of the mother. The author considers the possibility that maternal inability to mourn contributes significantly to the foreclosure of the child's "tertiary processes" (the processes involved in the child's development of a differentiated autonomous self and symbolization). In the clinical case presented in detail in this paper, the child's undifferentiated experience with his mother (who was unable to grieve) left no room for the father as the necessary third element in the child's maturational processes.

Dominance as part of self-concept mediates the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety among adolescents under residential care.

According to Rapee (1997), maternal social anxiety (SA) is directly associated with adolescent SA because maternal SA causes overprotective and controlling parental behavior. A total of 127 adolescents who were in the process of transitioning to a boarding school for at-risk youth as well as their mothers participated in the current study, 30% of the adolescents had experienced at least one depressive episode; 17.5% had been diagnosed with SA. We analyzed an expanding model of mediation, of maternal SA and depression in which specifically, adolescent self-perception was constructed as a latent factor that was formed by self-reported dominance and self-criticism. The results supported our hypotheses that maternal SA is not directly associated with adolescent SA. Rather, these relationships are mediated by adolescents' self-perception (i.e., dominance and self-criticism). The results call into question Rapee's theoretical arguments and support Gilbert's evolutionary theory.