Editor's Comments

It is a great privilege to publish Estela Welldon's remarkable meditation on living and dying, a paper she has worked on over many years. Starting from her experience of sudden family deaths ‘from a young age’, she argues that ‘true awareness of death, including one's own, is life-enhancing and can inspire great creative acts’. The article is accompanied by a photograph that stages Estela's own ‘deathbed scene’, taken by her son, a professional photographer. Dan Welldon offers a revealing commentary on ‘the process by which I prepared to photograph my mother's deathbed scene’. Noting that a ‘reluctance to document death is a very recent phenomenon’, he identifies two main styles in earlier deathbed paintings: the ‘grand canvas’ and the intimate portrait of the artist's loved one. He chose ‘a synthesis of these two styles’ for the photograph; his commentary is accompanied by two further, memorable photographs of his mother.

With this issue we are also honoured to announce the establishment of a Prize in Estela Welldon's name. The Prize, co-sponsored by the BJP and the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, ‘will be awarded annually to the author of a paper which contributes to our understanding of the shadow side of human nature - the ugly side, or what we might previously have called the “dark side” of humanity’. (For all the details, see p. 3.) The Estela Welldon Prize will complement our established Rozsika Parker Prize, which, as readers know, focuses on a critical engagement with questions of creativity in clinical or applied analytic work. I am very grateful to Brett Kahr and Carine Minne for their work in developing the Prize.

Turning to our regular Clinical and Theoretical Practice strand, we offer a rich group of papers. Hana Salaam Abdel-Malek explores the way in which her adolescent patient was able to ‘disengage from her internalized incestual family dynamics and the violence of an incestuous primal scene’. Nardus Saayman considers the psycho