Editorial

We are delighted that so many of our readers were able to participate in the XIth international Journal of Analytical Psychology conference, Attachment and Intersubjectivity in the Therapeutic Relationship, held in Boston in April this year. This highly successful conference co-sponsored with the New England Society of Analytical Psychology, the Boston Jung Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis attracted attendees from all over the world. This generated a vibrant gathering, further stimulated by the input from our speakers: we hope that this enlivening sense of community will be perpetuated through our publication of many of the conference papers beginning with this issue.

Invited speakers included Malcolm Slavin who helped open the conference with a remarkable mixed-media slide show and talk, ‘The Music Knows: Grieving Existential Trauma in Art, Music and Psychoanalysis’. That evening event was followed the next day by Beatrice Beebe's two-session dynamic presentation integrating infant research and adult treatment; the first was ‘Infant Research: Microanalysis of Mother-Infant Interaction’ and the second, ‘Adult Treatment: Video Feedback Consultation for a Patient Who Does Not Look’. Our third guest was Bessel van der Kolk, the world-known trauma researcher, whose talk ‘The Body Knows the Score’ traced the history of trauma studies and treatment from World War I through the present time challenging us to consider a variety of new treatment modalities that are more inclusive of the body and non-verbal communication.

It has been interesting to discover the papers in this issue—perhaps influenced by the Boston conference theme—to be a commentary on analytic attitude or, perhaps, the attitude of the analyst. A summary of the papers shows how the lines of a debate begin to emerge.

The story begins with two previously unpublished papers by Michael Fordham, for which Elizabeth Urban has written a detailed commentary, setting them in th