Editorial

This general issue – last for the year – opens with a substantial piece of archival research by Robert Ades tracing the history of Winnicott's interactions with his female producers at the BBC over the form, content and style of his many series of radio talks between 1943 and 1962. Focusing specifically on his relations with Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie, and drawing on unpublished correspondence, Ades develops a very striking and original narrative about their interventions, and their crucial role in shaping Winnicott's public voice – his language, his topics, his tone – for the British mass audience. It provides an intriguing case study of critical processes, and sensibilities, at work in transforming psychoanalytic discourse from the professional, private, clinical and somewhat jargon-laden sphere into an accessible public language, as well as evidence of the significant impact of these two women in mediating Winnicott's advice for mothers.

Language is also the primary focus of the two next pieces – Gloria Leff's account of a little-known and untranslated article by the Hungarian psychoanalyst, István Hollós, showcasing his work with a psychotic patient who began spontaneously reciting poetry in the clinical sessions. What is remarkable – so Leff argues – is the form of listening Hollós provided to his working-class, barely literate patient, whose spoken poetic phrases seemed to him to be somewhat strangely, at times incomprehensibly, formed. Rather than deal with these creative productions reductively – as merely evidence of a pathology, or linguistic or cognitive degeneration – Hollós leans towards different analogies (including from music) in order to try and fathom the sources of linguistic creativity. That is – in ways exemplary for his later psychiatric approaches – Hollós stretches the contemporary medical models of how ‘madness’ is framed and dealt with, in order to grant his patient a form of creative recognition. The poems as transcribed in the sessions b