Editorial

The articles in this edition of the BJP form a record of the conference that was held in May 2008 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood, and to celebrate the work of Dr Estela Welldon. Mother, Madonna, Whore is so much a part of the clinical landscape now, along with Welldon's conceptualization of perverse mothering, that it is hard to picture a time when the book did not exist. Yet as Welldon has recently written, recalling the 1980s, ‘I was completely new and my work unknown’ (Welldon 2008).1 In this sense the Journal provides not only a record of an event - the conference - but a survey of a clinical and cultural debate as it took shape and evolved. As will be apparent from the articles, Estela Welldon has not only been immensely influential in the field of forensic psychotherapy, groundbreaking in her recognition of female violence and perversion and an inspiration to those involved in group psychotherapy; she is also clearly held in great personal esteem. One of the features which distinguishes her is an unstinting appreciation of the contributions of others, and many of the articles emphasize her warmth and dynamism. We hope that these papers, together with her own article which reviews her 40-year career and reflects on the state of forensic psychotherapy now, will give the reader a sense of (almost) having been present on the day.

The conference was put on by the Portman Clinic in London, where Dr Welldon worked for 30 years. As Stan Ruszczynski states in his Introduction, the Portman is an NHS outpatient clinic which offers assessment and psychotherapeutic treatment to children, adolescents and adults, who enact delinquently, criminally or violently, or who act on their sexual impulses in ways which are disturbing or damaging to others or to themselves. Estela Welldon's paper, ‘Dancing With Death’, contextualizes the Portman Clinic's psychodynamic approach to perversion,