You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As well as reporting on the British Journal of Psychotherapy's 40th Birthday conference and notice about the editorial board, this editorial also carries two obituaries by Brett Kahr for our colleagues Camila Batmanghelidjh and Derek Draper, both of whom passed away earlier this year, and both were psychotherapists who were well-known in the public sphere.
The 40th birthday celebration conference of the British Journal of Psychotherapy (BJP) over the summer was a great opportunity to consider the role of a psychotherapy journal in supporting the continuity of knowledge exchange in the field of psychotherapy and also its role as space for debate with all of the disruption that might come in tow. In her keynote address in the morning of the conference, Helen Morgan spoke about the perils of the way in which some people ‘avoided potentially disruptive thought’. Helen argued that psychoanalysis has much to offer when it comes to understanding the deep troubles of our times; however, she argued that the revolutionary concepts of psychoanalysis, as well as its conformist inclinations, make psychoanalysis vulnerable to destructive forces, not only from without but also from within. She advocated for a critical approach, and while accepting the formidable intelligence and legacy of our psychoanalytic predecessors, she pointed to the necessity of ‘humility and holding our truths lightly’. This, Helen said, entails saving the world ‘one patient at a time’.
David Black's keynote set out a persuasive case for foregrounding ethics in all of our work, pointing to work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas's concept of the ‘face of the other’, David argued, offered a selfless proposition that moved ethics beyond a self-centred set of rules or procedures to be followed. Instead, the ‘face of the other’ creates a matricial space (Chetrit-Vatine, 2004) that is the primary source of an imbued ethical fabric in infant and child development through non-oppressiv