Editorial

The British Journal of Psychotherapy has recently celebrated the contribution of distinguished clinicians by devoting the whole of an issue to their work - Estela Welldon in 2009, the late Isabel Menzies Lyth earlier this year. In this issue we publish almost all the papers from a conference marking the ‘almost-retirement’ of the BJP's founder and founder editor, Bob Hinshelwood, from the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex last year.

The phrase ‘almost-retirement’ is Karl Figlio's, in his Introduction to the issue, and refers to Bob Hinshelwood's ongoing intellectual work in the field. Marking key methodological strands in Hinshelwood's work, the conference was organized into four panels: ‘Historical and Conceptual’, ‘Therapeutic Communities and Psychiatry’, ‘Institutions and Organizations’, and ‘Social and Political’. As Figlio writes, speakers ‘were asked to show the influence of his teaching, research and professional activities in their current research and practice’. All four themes are represented in the papers that follow, which retain their order of presentation on the day. John Forrester, Malcolm Pines and Rotraut De Clerck evocatively develop Bob's longstanding interest in the origins of psychoanalysis in the UK, with its links to psychoanalysis in Germany before the Nazi seizure of power. The papers situate psychoanalysis in relation both to the natural sciences and to a liberal political and aesthetic climate, and attend to specifically British features in the reception of psychoanalysis. Angela Foster, David Kennard and Nick Manning address clinical, historical and organizational features of the Therapeutic Community movement. In doing so they vividly bring out not only the acute tensions that can arise clinically in this work, but the powerful pull to disintegration as well as integration, in terms of organizational dynamics, that these therapeutic institutions can embody. While the clinical encounter and the archival narrative