One-Day Conference on ‘Bullying’

The meeting opened with the presentation which we publish above by Mr Michael Marland, Headteacher of North Westminster Community School in London. Mr Marland's humorous and skilful delivery captivated and held the audience. All participants, whether from the platform or from the floor, brought an immediacy and vitality to the discussion in their eagerness to share their experience with others and to respond to new ideas. People spoke of their feelings about working with groups of adolescents or individuals in schools, or from their experience in day-to-day clinical work, and many comments were met with the laughter of recognition. The atmosphere in the room was highly charged during the discussion of the problems of relationships, particularly from the standpoint of adolescents.

In the next part of the meeting Clifford Yorke gave his theoretical presentation. But, in discussing the psychology of bullying and the bullied he took us through the vicissitudes of drive development, in particular of aggression, from the unbearable conflicts of early life to the doomed love-triangle of the Oedipus complex. He discussed the development of the capacity to sublimate drives in a