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As readers of the Journal will know, the Annual Lecture is an occasion which brings together a guest speaker and our community of readers, editorial board members, and essay prize winners. 1994's Lecture, which marked the Journal's first 10 years, was something of a departure in two respects. It extended a debate which had been taking place in the Journal, and it took the form of a joint presentation.
By way of background, the starting-point was a paper by Anthony Ryle: a provocative critique of Betty Joseph's ‘Addiction to near-death’ from a cognitiveanalytic therapy perspective (BJP 10(1)), with my short response in the same issue and a further response by Dr Ryle (BJP 10(3) ). In a style designed to stimulate debate Dr Ryle was challenging a number of key assumptions about the approach to treatment, and to the treatment alliance, that stemmed, as he saw it, from a particular Kleinian model of the mind; he was also posing questions about the treatment of borderline personality disorder within and outside the public sector. How effective is long-term work? Can severe psychopathology be treated with the shorter-term therapies favoured in the public sector? How are resources best and most fairly deployed? For many these are questions of the greatest urgency.
The 1994 Lecture was planned during Bob Hinshelwood's last year as Editor, and with Jean Arundale's involvement as Editor-Elect the idea of extending the debate by inviting Peter Fonagy to speak together with Dr Ryle was arrived at. As Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College London, Peter Fonagy is working on developing the theory of psychoanalysis, including its ideas of the self. He too has a particular interest in the conceptualization and treatment of borderline states.
The format proved a successful one: as Jean Arundale said in her opening remarks, the two lecturers could ‘speak to each other, and relate to each other's ideas’. Readers will be able to track that process in