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.

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 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.