Editorial

It is an enormous pleasure and a privilege to be writing the editorial welcoming readers to the first of two special issues of Attachment: New Directions in Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, in celebration of John Bowlby's work twenty-five years after his death in September 1990.

The journal group have gathered together a wonderful collection of papers for this issue and we would like to thank all our contributors who have responded so eloquently to the challenge to write for us. Their thoughts in relation to John Bowlby's revolutionary theory of attachment and where we are now twenty-five years later, are so pertinent to the pressing social and psychological issues in our contemporary world.

Recently, as I was immersed in the John Bowlby archive going through the numerous boxes holding some of the treasures of this great man's life, I came across a buff folder with the title “Account of Bowlby's death, funeral, burial on Skye and memorial service at Southwark Cathedral, by Ursula Longstaff Bowlby. Includes photograph of the grave and a family tree”. I held my breath on opening this as it took me back in a flash to the day my partner John Southgate received the news of his death from John's secretary, Dorothy Southern. A short but very kindly written note in her distinctive handwriting. Then followed an announcement in The Times and a beautifully written obituary by Ann Shearer in The Guardian, which we are reproducing in this issue, entitled “Cherishing the children”. I had rediscovered it twenty-five years later in the buff folder—moved beyond words to tears now as I had been then … It had inspired the song title and lyrics Cherish the Child—one of John Southgate's compositions in his suite, Jazz for John Bowlby .

As I leafed through Ursula's carefully filed papers the first thing that I read had the title “In Memoriam” and alongside the heading she had written “John Bowlby 1907-1990”. It was a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that I gradually realised she h