Editorial

We are pleased to open this August 1999 edition of the journal with what we hope will be the first of a number of symposia on key concepts and where our thinking about them has reached today. In the spirit of the dictionary definition of a symposium as ‘a convivial meeting’, we offer this collection of opinions on various aspects of the subject of ‘frustration’, and we hope that, by having a public forum for diverse views, we continue the tradition of engendering respect for difference. The authors, Anne Alvarez, Anne Harrison and Edna O'Shaughnessy, all from London, have contributed their conceptual and technical thoughts on frustration, and we hope these may stimulate correspondence in future editions.

The next two papers from South Africa also represent a new departure in terms of our wish to reflect on the nature and scope of work around the world. In ‘Home thoughts from abroad’, Sheila Miller from Johannesburg offers an impressionistic account of life in South Africa and a description of her consultation work in a township community centre. She opens up the debate as to whether psychoanalytically informed thinking and practice are appropriate in the South African milieu. Her reflections at the end of the paper about the role of the ancestors in South African culture and links with psychoanalytic thinking lead naturally on to Suzanne Maiello's paper, ‘Encounter with an African healer’. The author, who lives in Rome, had the fascinating opportunity to meet with a healer while on a three months' stay in South Africa. She extends further, in a thought-provoking analysis, the debate about both the possibilities and limits of cross-cultural psychotherapy, and indicates the need for psychoanalytic thinking to be open to the findings of interdisciplinary research, particularly in the area of anthropology.

The clinical section begins with ‘The suffering of Asperger children’, by Judy Shuttleworth, who has made a major contribution to the work of integrating recent researc