‘It is for many children a matter of life and death, the relationship that develops between psyche and soma’, Ann Horne reminds us in her introductory reflections to this selection of her papers. In an age of artificial intelligence and disembodied social communication, the body has erupted into the public consciousness with a similar urgency; the visceral, life-or-death quality that infuses much of the current debate around body and identity - what we make of our bodies, what our bodies make of us - seems at times to threaten our capacity to think. Both within psychoanalysis and in the wider socio-political context, there is a risk we sabotage meaningful exchange in the rush to take up a position. To borrow Horne's description of the rifts that gave rise to the creation of the Independent child psychotherapy