Introduction

The BJP's joint conference with the Freud Museum, London in November 2015 marked the renewal of an early collaborative project in the Journal's history, going back to the 1990s. It is a pleasure to be working closely again on the planning of a conference with Ivan Ward, Deputy Director and Director of Learning at the Museum; and to have the backing of Carol Siegel, Director of the Freud Museum, along with the active support of the British Psychotherapy Foundation, co-owner of the BJP, for the project as a whole. This initial conference, ‘Mentalization and the Unconscious’, marked the first in a series of annual events to be held over the next period. Our aim is to explore issues which are live and meaningful in contemporary clinical, professional and cultural debate.

‘Mentalization and the Unconscious’ took place within the Freud Museum's Festival of the Unconscious, a revisiting, in different media, of Freud's seminal paper of 1915, ‘The unconscious’. This was a paper that James Strachey, Freud's translator and editor, has said was written in less than three weeks (Strachey, 1957, p. 161). As the Museum's website put it, the existence of unconscious processes in the mind was recognized long before Freud, but:

What Freud introduced was the revolutionary notion of a dynamic unconscious, working in a different way from consciousness, with its own kind of logic… in which certain ideas are hidden from conscious awareness but continue to motivate our behaviour. He established ‘the unconscious’ as the principal object of psychoanalysis and the key term of its theory.

The conference sought to keep this ‘principal object’ in mind as the speakers considered the origins and development of the concept of mentalization, and its influential place in contemporary psychoanalysis - both theoretically and in terms of therapeutic practice.1 Each of the speakers, from their individual perspective, creatively addressed these questions, implicitly or explicitly. Four of the five main paper