Editorial

This is a general issue of the Journal although a theme connecting many of the articles is the dynamic interconnection between mind and body. This particularly comes into view when they are un-reconciled, as we know can be the case in situations of trauma, premature bereavement or interruption to early relationship as the articles presented here will confirm.

The first two articles take trauma as a central focus, which undoubtedly will be of interest to the readership. The first by Paddy Martin considers how unprocessed traumatic experience finds bodily expression and the following article by Francesco Bisagni highlights perceptual distortion in particular as a response to trauma.

Henry Maudsley was a physician working in the UK in the nineteenth century who addressed the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1870 with a lecture concerning body and mind and an inquiry into their connection and mutual influence. Maudsley lends the inspiration to the evocative title of Paddy Martin's original article, ‘Grief that has no vent in tears, makes other organs weep’. Martin draws on neuroscience and anthropology to complement his psychoanalytic exploration of psychosomatic illness. He describes clinical work in a hospital paediatric setting with asylum-seeking families who have survived horrific acts of war. The entrenched physical symptoms of his patients in the absence of organic cause and their wish for physical treatment is the backdrop to Martin's in-depth analysis of the many mechanisms underlying psychosomatic illness. What comes across strongly in his article is the complexity and entanglement of the physical and psychological as the slow and painful work of attaching meaning to both symptom and experience is struggled with in therapy.

The discord between experience and bodily reaction also features in Bisagni's article, which is a painful account of psychotherapy with a latency boy who discovered the body of his dead father following his suicide. The voice of the c