Editorial

In a complex and imaginative exploration of interiority and space in Freud's consulting room in Vienna, Diana Fuss has written that ‘The very arrangement of couch and chair facilitates an erotics of voice, privileging sound over sight, speech over spectatorship’. Even so, ‘for their first consultation with the doctor, patients were seated in the chair at the very center of the study, surveyed not only by Freud but also by the heads and figurines on the surrounding walls and tables …. the patient suddenly finds himself exposed on all sides to a multitude of gazes’.1 If this is the founding moment of analytic practice, its coordinates - of voice and gaze - remain in place today, albeit in varying forms, and perhaps differently represented in the mind. Some of these forms and representations, in contemporary clinical practice, are explored in this issue of the Journal.

The first two articles explore - survey, look at - individual practice within a wider context, and in different ways: the psychosocial context of early boarding, on the one hand, and the research context of a grounded theory study of borborygmi, on the other.

First, in ‘Boarding School Syndrome: broken attachments a hidden trauma’, Joy Schaverien seeks to identify a cluster of symptoms and behaviours under the heading of a specific syndrome, a pattern of ‘profound developmental damage’ and apparent self-sufficiency observable in many adult patients with a history of having been early boarders. Part of a wider enquiry into the psychological impact of boarding at different developmental stages, the paper focuses on the fine grain of early boarding and the latency child. Schaverien thoughtfully investigates the impact of an ‘often irrevocable loss’ of primary attachments on later attachment patterns, using a wide range of data from clinical practice, recent work on attachment and relatedness, documentary films on the suffering in boarding school, and narratives by psychoanalysts and patients. All are integrat