Editor's Comments

As readers will know, the Journal's annual Prize in honour of the psychiatrist and forensic psychotherapist Estela Welldon was established a year ago. It is awarded to ‘the author of a paper which contributes to our understanding of the shadow side of human nature’. We are delighted that in its first year, we have joint winners and a commended author. The winning papers, both offering rich accounts of the clinical encounter, are published in this issue of the journal. First, Stephen Blumenthal considers the challenges of working with a psychic retreat based upon disavowal. ‘A state of inbetweenness’, he suggests, ‘protects the person from knowing about their aggressive impulses, their need for care and the passing of time’. Two parallel worlds existed, ‘one in which [my patient S] was omnipotent, and the other in which he needed and depended on others. These worlds began to collide and S was able to communicate to me that. …I should not mistake his apparent self-containment for self-sufficiency’. Then, Elena Mundici considers the relationship between music and violence. ‘Similarly to violence’, she writes, ‘the execution of a piece of music involves a synergy of physical, mental and affective functions, and an interaction of conscious and unconscious forces.’ Noting that ‘the structured and formal language of music provided a rigorous yet flexible space where [a] prisoner's internal world and unconscious phantasies could begin to be confronted’, she explores how piano training provided a dimension where creativity and destructiveness could be enacted ‘without fatal consequences’.

Heather Wood's commended paper will be published in our May issue. Our congratulations again to all three authors.

In our New Voices strand, Susan Tyler explores substance misuse problems among children of alcoholics (COAs), from the perspective of transgenerational trauma. There is a particular focus on Jung's concept of the transcendent function, which provides, the author suggests, ‘a powe