Editorial

This issue of the Journal begins in the external world, with Pat Hunt and Brian Daines' suggestive exploration of the dynamics of climbing. Posing a question about the degree to which these dynamics can be understood within the limits of everyday defensive processes and how much they go beyond this into the clearly pathological, they bring together climbers' written accounts, the ideas of Winnicott, Betty Joseph and Warren Colman, and their own clinical practice to illustrate ideas about the rock as a lover and a holding environment, climbing as a defence against intimacy, and a way of life that can be ‘underpinned by omnipotent denial of mortality’.

Considerations of near-death experience lead into the Journal's Franco-British exchange on sexuality and the death drive, deriving from a joint BJP/Freud Museum conference, ‘Eros and Thanatos’, in 2002. Introduced by Jean Arundale, the papers promote an engagement between key aspects of the conceptual frameworks of Freud, Klein, Bion and Laplanche. Jean Laplanche's and Nicola Abel-Hirsch's papers closely follow their conference presentations. David Bell's commentary on Laplanche, written specially for this issue of the Journal, offers a contemporary Kleinian perspective on the issues. The juxtaposition of these distinct idioms and frameworks allows readers to track similarities and differences, implied or explicit, in conceptions about the origins of the unconscious and processes of binding and unbinding; the nature of perverse sexuality; what sustains the drive for life as well as the vicissitudes of the death drive. Taking just one area as an example: to what extent might Bion's model of a ‘saturated receptor’ (cited in Abel-Hirsch) map onto Laplanche's model of the ‘enigmatic signifier’ in the mother-infant relationship? Bion's focus is on the absence of mother as enabling the first thought; Laplanche's is on the traumatic implantation of messages from the mother. Bell, who welcomes the debate for the opportunity it g