Editor's Comments

The November issue of the Journal always includes work that has been Commended in the most recent Rozsika Parker Prize. We are delighted to publish the two papers Commended in 2019, one embodying creativity from an applied perspective, one from a clinical perspective, both written with meticulous care. Lutz Goetzmann starts from an experience of the new Bauhaus Museum in Weimar as ‘bleak, lifeless and ugly’, then coming to an understanding of Bauhaus aesthetics as an ‘architectural answer’ to traumatic modernity. Sylvia O'Neill looks at the impaired capacity for symbolization in a patient ‘with autistic features and rigid resistance to free association’, addressing the principle that ‘countertransferential working through precedes the patient's acquiring a capacity for working through in the transference’. Our congratulations to both authors.

We are also delighted to publish another paper in our New Voices strand. Rebecca Davies thoughtfully explores the double session (two 50-minute sessions back-to-back, a single 100-minute session) as a treatment option, focusing on work with one particular male client. Aware of ‘the many objections’, she examines how therapy can be ‘enhanced by its intensity’, arguing for further research and use of the double session to ‘deepen and enhance once-weekly work’.

The Journal's joint conference with the Freud Museum, ‘The representation of illness in clinical and cultural space’, took place in November 2019. Introducing the conference from the chair, I referenced Oliver Sacks's much-admired piece about illness published shortly before he died, a moving article about homeostasis and its vicissitudes (Sacks, 2015). ‘It is especially when things are going wrong, internally’, he wrote, ‘when homeostasis is not being maintained…that…the feeling of how one is… takes on an intrusive, unpleasant quality, and now one will say, “I feel ill - something is amiss”.’ It was this simple sense of something being ‘amiss’ - amiss in the body, in the min