Editorial

This edition of the journal continues to reflect the increasingly international nature of our readers and contributors. It is fascinating to hear about work in Denmark (Liselotte Grunbaum), Italy (Gabriella Pansini) and Greece (Dimitris Anastasopoulos) that resonates so clearly with work going on elsewhere. Four papers (by Meira Likierman, Lynda Miller, Dimitris Anastasopoulos and Peter Evans) discuss adolescent processes — a fact that belies the journal's title, a title which does not, in fact, fully reflect our interests, which include not only adolescence, but also very young children and babies.

We are also very pleased to include three papers given by the authors at major international conferences — two in London (Penelope Leach and Meira Likierman) and one in Athens (Liselotte Grunbaum). At times there can be a sense of exponential growth in the number of interesting conferences and papers being given in our profession, leading to a sense that it is impossible to keep up with all the stimulating ideas that are buzzing around. The recent EFPP (European Federation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Child Section) conference in Stockholm was a prime example of the amount of high-quality, interesting work going on throughout Europe. Publishing papers that have been given at conferences helps to spread these ideas. So we would like to encourage more of our readers to send us conference papers and lectures they have given, so that their hard work in preparing these papers reaches as large an audience as possible.

We are privileged to open this edition of the journal with the lecture given by Penelope Leach as the Anna Freud Centenary Lecture in London in November 1995: ‘Attachment: facing the professional demands of today's research findings’. Her work is possibly best known through her many publications on child care and development for the general public, about which she feels passionately and in which she has had considerable influence. This stimulating lecture provi