Editorial

‘Words’, Freud said in 1905, ‘are the essential tool of mental treatment’, and these words are written with such conviction that it is perhaps appropriate that Ann Scott reminds us in her Introduction to this year's BJP lecture ‘how hard it can be to translate experience, the reality of the psyche, into language’ (quoting from the editors' Introduction to Mind Readings). Indeed, as this volume will show, the translation of the reality of the psyche is not a straightforward matter of finding the right word. ‘Ideas and experiences that are temporally or intellectually complex often can be understood more clearly from diagrams or maps than from verbal descriptions’ writes Susan Hiller.

Blake Morrison, in his BJP lecture ‘On Childhood and Violence’ painfully reminds us that words, encoded in the form of reports and rules of justice, can be overwhelmed when we are faced with cruelty, brutality and murder. He was a reporter at the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables for the killing of James Bulger and was shocked to discover that right from the beginning the trial violated the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These children were not treated ‘in a manner consistent with the promotion of the child's dignity and worth’. In William Blake's poem, ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ Morrison reminded us that there are:

classic conflicting views we have about children; on the one hand, that they are already, when born, hard little pebbles, intractably themselves, their personalities programmed on some fixed, unalterable course; on the other hand, that they are clods of clay, to be shaped by those around them, so that if we handle them with love and care they will turn out best porcelain, but if we neglect and are careless with them they will break and become ugly.

This is an eloquent image of the eternal debate about how to understand why we do what we do. His lecture was a powerful testimony to the way in which we can become pebble-like at the moment when we need to be m