Editor's Comments

It is always a special pleasure to publish the papers awarded the Rozsika Parker Prize, and in this issue we publish the three winning papers in the 2018 competition. Something about them – some quality that, to my eyes, the three papers shared, even though I could not quite put it into words - took me back to Margot Waddell's evocative Appreciation of Rosie in this Journal, following her death in 2010. In it Rosie was described as having ‘a particular quality of being … an unusually deep, creative and aesthetic appreciation of the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship’ (Waddell 2011, p.218). It was this ‘particular quality of being’ that led us to make questions of creativity the focus of the Prize in Rosie's memory; our three authors approach the question of creativity in the therapeutic relationship in a most thought-provoking way, each with its own ‘particular quality of being’.

Alexis Tomarken (Winner, Student Path) explores the experience of returning to a previous case, when a suicide in her own life brings her back to the suicide in her patient's life. She examines ‘how we cannot only alter our patients’ lives and future, but also how they can inform us of ours’, in ‘a complex entanglement of life histories of loss, current roles of caretaking, and future fears of what was to come in our lives.’

The Post-Qualification Prize was awarded jointly, to Guy Millon and Katya Orrell. Guy Millon argues that gender functions ‘as a fetish, screen or trick, that covers over traumatic loss’, an application of Lacan's theory of the gaze that designates all gender expressions as ‘modes of creative action’. His argument is developed by means of clinical material from three young trans patients. Katya Orrell, writing in a forensic context, addresses the psychic impact of an imprisonment for public protection sentence, ‘a sentence with no finite ending’. Using the concept of the swansong, ‘a song considered to be more beautiful because of the fragility of a life that is abou