Full text unavailable

You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.

AJRPP 6(1):vii-ix (2012)

Editorial

Author: Kate White

Kate White

Training therapist, supervisor, teacher, and Chair of the Clinical Training Committee at The Bowlby Centre. She is also acting editor of the journal, Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis. Formerly a senior lecturer at South Bank University, London, in the Department of Nursing and Community Health Studies, she has used her extensive experience in adult education to contribute to the innovative psychotherapy curriculum developed at The Bowlby Centre. In addition to working as an individual psychotherapist, Kate writes about psychotherapy education and runs workshops on the themes of attachment and trauma in clinical practice. Informed by her experience of growing up in South Africa, she has long been interested in the impact of race and culture on theory and on clinical practice. She has edited two books, Unmasking Race, Culture and Attachment in the Psychoanalytic Space; What do we see? What do we think? What do we feel? (Karnac, 2006) and Touch: Attachment and the Body (Karnac, 2004), and co-edited a three others, one with Joseph Schwartz, Sexuality and Attachment in Clinical Practice (Karnac, 2007), a second with Sarah Benamer Trauma and Attachment (Karnac, 2008), and a third with Judy Yellin, Shattered States, Disorganised Attachment and its Repair, Karnac (2012). Finally an article, published in The Attachment and Human Development Journal (6: 117-130) 2004, entitled Developing a secure-enough base: teaching psychotherapists in training the relationship between attachment theory and clinical work. Email:

Abstract

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana (1905, p. 284)

Ifeel particularly privileged to have had the opportunity to bring together the contributors of this issue of the journal. They seem to have provided in a remarkable way something very special. The link between all the contributions appears to me to be a link with history. The other aspect that they share is that they come from very different parts of the world, namely Italy, Israel, Canada, and the UK. In addition two of our poets in this issue are from France, others are from the USA, UK, and Ireland. I am conscious that one of our aims as a journal is to represent work from different parts of the world, so it is particularly heartening to see this in the current issue and to recognise that attachment and relational approaches are being developed in many different parts of the globe. The voices of both therapist and client are also present in poetry and prose-again something we are committed to fostering.

George Santayana (1905, p. 284), a famous philosopher, is quoted as saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

We will all recognise the significance of this statement for the well-being and progress of our work, clients and therapists alike. The necessity of revisiting the past is vital, a past from which we may have dissociated, perhaps including the experiences of neglect and utter loneliness and desolation. To recognise its traumatic impact and whilst in the companionship of another, we also need to mourn and grieve. This is the theme taken up with dedication and profound emotion by Paul Finnegan and Graham Clarke as they write about the work with Evelyn, a patient who describes her therapeutic journey over ten years as gaining her “PhD in Wellness”. She was a courageous woman whose story, her “history” or “herstory”, one might say, she wanted known so that others might learn and benefit.

From the heart of the clinical encounter, we move to