Editorial

In an unpublished draft essay on ‘Foucault and psychoanalysis’, the bulk of which was later incorporated into Seductions of Psychoanalysis (Forrester, 1990), John Forrester notes that, out of a number of books to which he turned when looking for intellectual refreshment, top of the list was Freud. But not far behind were the works of Michel Foucault: ‘As a result’, he continues, ‘my personal reaction to the news of his death was that the flow of good books, of good matter to feed on, was stopped. I was going to have to go hungry in future.’ It seems a very Freudian reaction - to frame death purely from the perspective of the living, and indeed, the still living infant within. But it was not just his feeding that was interrupted: ‘just as speedy was the sense that Foucault's work has been interrupted, entirely unjustly and without reason … I expected as much from Foucault to come as had been given by Foucault to date.’1

This special issue of Psychoanalysis and History, the journal so closely associated with John Forrester's name for a decade, begins with a similar sentiment: both that John's life and work was unjustly, unreasonably interrupted in autumn 2015; and that those that knew him primarily through his work have been denied the ‘flow of good books’, though this has been mitigated in the first instance by the posthumous release of his magnum opus, Freud in Cambridge, written with Laura Cameron (Forrester & Cameron, 2017), as well as the gathering of essays connected with the project of ‘Thinking in Cases’ (see the review essays in this volume by Maud Ellmann and Bonnie Evans). In fact, those wishing