Introductory Remarks

As many of you know, the Journal held lectures given by individuals for a number of years. Over the last three or four years we have been staging debates, because we feel that they create an encounter between different perspectives that can perhaps be particularly fruitful. From my perspective the fact that this lecture sold out some weeks ago speaks for itself, and we are absolutely delighted that you are all here.

Both our speakers are eminent in their own fields. Blake Morrison has been commentating, in both memoir and journalism, for some years, on childhood, masculinity, and the relationship between parents and children, most notably in his book about his father, And when did you last see your father? Anne Alvarez has more than 30 years experience of treating autistic, psychotic and borderline children and adolescents as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

The book which forms the occasion for this lecture, As If, evolved from a piece of reportage in the New Yorker. As many of you know, Blake Morrison writes about the trial in 1993 of children, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, for the killing of 2-year-old James Bulger. As If is a book that has already been taken very seriously by workers in the law, social work and the probation service. It was in part because I was impressed that here was a book taken seriously by fellow professionals, and I could see the potential links with issues of concern to psychotherapists, that I proposed that we invite him to give this lecture and I was extremely pleased to have the enthusiastic support of my colleagues in the Journal.

Now Blake Morrison does much more than report a trial. He considers the way an event in the public domain permeates the mind; the way it revives memories of an earlier self, individual and collective; the questions it poses about being a child. We wanted the opportunity to hear the questions that he raises - which I think are centrally questions of meaning and memory - debated in our own field.

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