Reintegrating “Fathers”, Psychoanalysis, and Ourselves

Welcome to this special edition of Attachment on “Fathers”. Before I explore further why I selected this topic as my inaugural edition and introduce the authors who have supported my vision in capturing the overall theme and tone of this special issue, I shall first briefly introduce myself professionally and, in doing so, attempt to set out the new era for Attachment—New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychanalysis. I will later add a more personal account of my background and experience and acknowledge this is unusual for an editorial. But this likely one-off highly personal account is a new way of framing the editor's role and identity.

As both an epidemiologist and a clinical psychologist; and both an attachment/systemic Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) clinician and a “Freudian”, I present a particular type of outlier, often positioned as “other” in whichever context I reside. When I trained initially as a psychiatric epidemiologist, it was suggested I go off and become a clinical psychologist, having apparently too much “personality” for academia. Whilst training as a clinical psychologist, I was often regarded as too scientific, too academic. When I found myself training both analytically and systemically in tandem, at The Bowlby Centre, I was initially positioned as overly focused on the systemic reality of the world, being asked by one of my peers to explain what exactly is systemic? Whilst over at the Institute of Family Therapy, I was teased quite relentlessly for being a Freudian!

Far from feeling not belonging and excluded, I felt I was crucial, a crucial reminder to the others of the split-off self, that which needed much reintegration. Like the prominent themes in the works of Freud, such exclusion may precede inclusion, though it has been argued we are always left out, when we think we're most included (Phillips, 2021). Freud tells us that we can only survive by exclu