This paper uses the logic derived by Matte Blanco to provide an Archimedean point and a mathematics, both of which Jung complained of lacking, with which to validate the notion of synchronicity and to demonstrate that it is one of the inevitable properties of an unconscious which is unrepressed such as Jung's collective unconscious, and that such an unconscious will also be affective and interpersonal as well as intrapersonal. These have important clinical implications. After an exposition of Matte Blanco's thinking, some clinical material is presented of an episode in which patient and author both suffered the same psychosomatic symptom some time just prior to a session. Correspondences between Matte Blanco's logically derived ideas and Jung's phenomenological observations are made.

This paper argues that a potent cause of impasse in analysis/psychotherapy is the fear of annihilation by uncontained affect, and that the ‘retreat’(Steiner 1993) to which the patient has recourse is often prompted by such anxiety rather than by paranoid‐schizoid or depressive anxiety. Such retreats are marked by defensive attempts to occupy the object, to abolish separation, and to avoid emotional links that are feared will bring on the overwhelming affect related to attachment failures from the past. Thus, analysis itself is perceived unconsciously to be the disaster against which the patient is likely to implement an impasse. This approach offers an alternative to the concept of retreat as described by Steiner (ibid.), but is not intended to replace it. Either model may be indicated clinically in different circumstances. The author introduces the theories of Armando Ferrari and Ignacio Matte Blanco, both consonant with Ogden's theory of the autistic‐contiguous position and offering alternative explanations for the clinical phenomena. The technical implications of these considerations are then discussed in relation to some of the clinical material from Steiner's (2000) paper, ‘Containment, enactment and communication’.

This paper describes the work of Armando Bianco Ferrari whose central tenet is the very direct relationship between the body (Concrete Original Object) and the mind to which it gives rise, but which is also mind's first and essentially only real object. Ferrari's approach offers an important avenue of approach to the treatment of psychosis, psychosomatic illness and anorexia, for instance, as is recorded in a by now growing Anglophone literature. The direct relationship between body and mind is in contrast to the object relations model in which this relationship is mediated through the breast. The paper starts with a short biological sketch of Ferrari's life before describing his theoretical position. This is largely concerned with the relationship between the mind and its body, the so-called 'vertical axis', and that with the external world which he calls, the 'horizontal axis'. The relationship between body and mind is achieved through the means of a 'contact net' (as opposed to Bion's contact barrier) and the evolution of 'language registers' out of patterns of bodily experience. Ferrari's formulation also involves modifications of the ways he conceives the ego and the oedipal situation ('Oedipal constellation'), especially in the light of what he takes to be an innate femininity and masculinity in either sex, as well as the way in which he frames ideas about health and illness. The fact that the emphasis is directed towards the subject's direct apperception of the sensational and emotional life of his body rather than one mediated exclusively via the object involves a parallel shift away from the transference as always necessarily central to interpretation, without of course dispensing with it or suggesting that it is not ubiquitous. This is one of the various clinical implications of Ferrari's model which is discussed before offering an illustrative clinical vignette, and finally relating Ferrari's thought to some other current theoretical and clinical formulations.

This paper1 is about the psychotherapy of a woman who passed from what Waddell (1998) would term 'older age' to 'later life', by which latter I mean the inevitable decline into dying and death. However unwelcome these developments may be to the individual, they are none the less activities of the soma, and therefore activities of the self-deintegrates. Much of the work of the psychotherapy centred around the task of enabling the patient to relate to and accept the bodily and emotional correlates of this process, which she tended to want to disown and deny by means of a split between mind and body along the lines of a long-standing internal depressive relationship. Permitting her contact with herself allowed her a much greater sense of internal company and peace, and arguably facilitated an easier process of dying, involving a self reconciled with itself rather than one at odds. Technically, the approach involved a greater concentration on the intrapsychic relationship rather than on the relationship between patient and analyst, and this is briefly discussed in terms of the work of Armando Ferrari who had himself died, shortly before the paper was first presented, and to whom therefore it is in part a homage.

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