Editorial

It proved popular to have a previous section of poems; at least it was popular with other poets who subsequently submitted many poems. We have selected four poets in this issue. As we have previously mused (Editorial, Winter 88-89), the nature of human expression has separate forms, but the boundaries between each are fuzzy.

The comment by Whyte on causation and disposition reminds us of this distinction, and that its problems do not just go away. Jeremy Holmes' Lecture for the Journal last May, which we publish in this issue of the Journal, is a view from the country; a more leisurely amble through the territory that might become a civil war between the two cultures of science and literature. The values inherent in human relationships and in self-appraisal are not simply translatable into those of impartial science and the investigations of causation. The values of working with human beings are to be found in those of human association: social values. In a detailed argument Jeremy Holmes has pointed to how the ingredients of psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be expressed in social values of assimilation, pluralism, irony and imagery (the transformational image).

Nathan Field also wishes to draw our attention to a similar correspondence. He has neatly demonstrated the way in which the apparently scientific approaches to the positive and negative transferences which characterise different schools of analytic psychotherapy can be understood equally in terms of healing and exorcism respectively.

It is not possible to write about, nor read about, child sexual abuse without a rising indignation, a moral reaction that is not part of rational science but which is nevertheless the essence of the problem of child abuse. We cannot divorce a human reaction from our scientific awareness. As Whyte indicates, and as Fiona Gardner ruthlessly pursues, the question of moral and social values persists right into the therapeutic session and is the core of the transference/counter-transfer