“Without Tenderness, We are in Hell”

Welcome to this edition of the Attachment journal, a special edition on the theme of ageing and eldership and my second edition as editor-in-chief. I hope that you will enjoy it. I have taken this editorial's title from a line in a poem by Adrienne Rich (2013), “without tenderness, we are in hell”, which seemed to have resonance for an edition on ageing and need for tenderness and understanding as we age.

First, I wish to thank Gülcan Sutton Purser, for the suggestion that the theme of ageing and eldership would be an interesting and important subject for this edition of the journal. The suggestion sprung from a conference which took place earlier in 2025. I am delighted that speakers at the conference were able to contribute such moving and important articles. I also wish to thank Brett Kahr for his thought-provoking article on the history of psychoanalytic understanding of ageing.

I also wish to extend my heartfelt welcome and thanks to the newly formed editorial team. Our deputy editor, Sally Rose; book review editor, Christian Howes; and poetry editor, Sue Wright. It is of massive comfort, excitement, and reassurance that such a high calibre of individuals have stepped forwards to ensure the journal's continuing survival and ongoing growth, development, and move towards thriving.

We have also decided to reprint two seminal articles from the journals rich back catalogue and to continue to celebrate the journal's history. We chose Mark Linington's “Attachment, trauma, and organisations” and Giovanni Liotti's “Infant attachment and the origins of dissociative processes: An approach based on the evolutionary theory of multiple motivational systems”. Both have relevance to the theme of age and ageing, as frequently care of the elderly happens in institutions (hospitals, care homes, hospices, etc.) and dissociative processes which may have their seeds in infancy rear their heads again in later life (Henley, 2019; Sherwood, 2019).

The return of the poetry section of the jo