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Dear Editor
It is regrettable in this day and age that it should be necessary to defend the right of ‘free speech’ in an analytic psychotherapy journal. It is perhaps a comment on the general state of the whole discourse and perhaps of its current petit bourgeois tendencies, or perhaps it's just certain factions within the discourse.
BJP 20:1 contained letters from James Taylor (pp. 85-90) and A.J. McGuire (pp. 90-92) suggesting that an article with which they disagreed and of which they disapproved should not have been published by the Journal. BJP 20:2 contained replies from the author of the offending article (Harold Bourne) and from the editor at the time (Jean Arundale). The debate about the content of the article itself is interesting and very much the sort of thing we need in the analytic psychotherapy discourse. What is regrettable is the call for censorship of unpopular, controversial or even outdated views, and that neither Harold Bourne nor Jean Arundale challenge the proposal for censorship on the grounds of the right to free speech. Indeed Jean Arundale goes so far as to express sorrow for offence having been caused. But offence is precisely what has provoked the debate which censorship would have denied us.
James Taylor in his letter actually went further in announcing his support for the editorial view expressed in BJP 19:3 (pp. 399) that the term ‘rabid Kleinians’, used in a book review, was ‘inappropriate and inflammatory language not seemly for a learned journal’. Yet more censorship. And a reference to the fact that Jean Arundale had already agreed that the journal should have censored this particular phrase.
Personally, I find the offending phrase vivid and evocative, and as such entirely appropriate for the discourse of psychotherapy, which is presumably supposed to address, among other things, the outer reaches of human consciousness and behaviour, not to mention human unconsciousness. As Theodor Adorno memorably put it, ‘In psychoanalysis nothing