Editorial

Readers across the world will have been deeply saddened by the news last November of the death of Frances Tustin. Although we had always known of the range of her teaching and the generosity with which she undertook this, as letters poured in to the Tavistock Clinic the extent of her influence and the internationality of her loss became dramatically underlined. We recall her kindness and thoughtfulness in sending her two last papers to the Journal for our first Routledge issue in 1994. Today we are glad to publish Maria Rhode's tribute to Frances: we have much to mourn and much to celebrate in knowing her.

It is always a pleasure to publish ‘the next Anne Alvarez’. ‘Motiveless malignity: problems in the psychotherapy of psychopathic patients’ is the final version of a paper given and discussed in Italy, Oxford and London. In it the author points the differences between the states of mind and internal worlds of neurotic, borderline and psychopathic patients with reference to qualities of destructiveness. The implications for technique are fully and usefully discussed, together with the impact on the psychopathic patient of meeting him in his world — ‘the inner bleak emotional cemetery’.

Leslie Ironside tackles the important area of false allegations of abuse by a patient — an area vital for practitioners to think about and plan for. The differences between allegations which are clearly recognized in the network as transference issues and those which are not are outlined via case examples, and the impact of child abuse procedures on patient, network and — painfully — therapist and family are explored. It is a brave paper and, we feel, an issue which needs greater recognition and discussion within the child mental health field.

‘Eric: a traumatized child’ is a paper originally given by Pat Radford in San Francisco and later in London. In it she explores the impact of ongoing interpersonal violence on the development of a 3-year-old boy. His five times weekly analytic trea