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Literature and psychoanalysis have long been valued at the Tavistock Clinic. Martha Harris, the luminous child psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, who, with John Bowlby, founded the child psychotherapy training (from which six of the nine writers come), fought off yearly attempts to exclude the degree of English Literature as a satisfactory prerequisite for the training. There were calls for medicine, psychology and sociology to be the key background degrees. However, Mattie commented that being steeped in literature was a great bonus, something that her daughter Meg Harris Williams, who is quoted from extensively in this evocative book, fully understood. The current Head of the Child Psychotherapy Training, Margaret Rustin has followed in this tradition by writing extensively on children's literature together with her husband, Professor Michael Rustin.
Co-editors child psychotherapist Hamish Can-ham and poet/sociologist Carole Satyamurti chose the title Acquainted with the Night from a poem by Robert Frost. Among the feelings they hoped the title would evoke were awareness of death and the intensity of experience and feeling that the night can bring.
Tragically, Hamish Canham died in 2003 at the age of 41, before the book was finally published. He did, however, know it was almost within the public sphere. Carole Satyamurti, commenting on the new Hamish Canham Poetry Prize, established by his parents (Poetrynews, 2004), wrote movingly about his last days surrounded by his loving family. A few days before his death she read poems to him, focussing on Frost, Larkin and George Herbert: ‘… I will never forget his complete attention and stillness as I read. It renewed my sense that poetry - the sound and music of it, perhaps even more than the sense -has power to reach across the deepest chasms’.
Poetry and psychoanalysis reach profound issues of life and death. At the very start of psychoanalysis, Freud brought in his appreciation and ambivalence of the poet. For Freud, the