Introduction

2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Estela Welldon's work on female perversion and violence, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood. In May 2008 the Portman Clinic, where Estela Welldon worked for 30 years as a Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy before retiring in 2001, took the opportunity of that anniversary to hold a conference to celebrate her work and demonstrate how some of her ideas have gone on being developed both inside the Clinic and elsewhere, including through members of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy (IAFP) which brings together clinicians and others interested in the field. Estela Welldon is the IAFP's Founder and Honorary Elected President for Life.

The book Mother, Madonna, Whore quickly came to be recognized as a seminal work on female perversion and violence and Jonathan Pedder (1990), reviewing the book, describes it as a ‘vivid and illuminating’ contribution to the field of what Freud referred to as ‘the riddle’ of female sexuality. But Estela Welldon was also known for her work as a group analyst and the papers given at the conference mark her range of interests.

The Portman Clinic is an NHS outpatient clinic, part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, offering 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. Such (adult) patients may be categorized as ‘forensic’, though not all have been through the criminal justice system, or described as suffering from an ‘antisocial personality disorder’. In addition, based on this accumulated experience of the complex relationship between mental states, enactment and the use of the body (the