On 14 February 2009, just a year after her death, the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust jointly hosted a conference in honour of Isabel Menzies Lyth. The papers in this special issue of the British Journal of Psychotherapy are the outcome of this conference.

Isabel Menzies Lyth was distinguished as a leading member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, where she was both a child analyst and a training analyst. She was also one of the early members of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, where she carried out many innovative and influential action research projects, several of which she described in the two published volumes of her essays (Menzies Lyth, 1988, 1989). She was both a distinguished psychoanalyst and unusual in her professional commitment to the