You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this issue, I am delighted to publish the best papers submitted for the first Essay Prize of the APP Educational Trust.
The Educational Trust took the inspired and very generous decision to award an annual prize of £1000 for the best essay submitted. Their hope was to encourage high standards of scholarship and to support the journal by giving authors an incentive to submit papers to us. In this first year, we received thirteen papers, many of a very high standard. The judging was undertaken by members of the Educational Trust of the APP and members of the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
The winner is Ian Thurston, with his paper Developing the Therapeutic Alliance in Acute Mental Health Care. The runner-up is Hope Samuel, with her paper on Adoption: Some Clinical Features of Adults who have been Adopted and the Difficulties of Helping them in NHS Psychotherapy. Paul Barrows submitted a paper on Change in Parent-Infant Psychotherapy, also judged to be a runner-up, which he has decided to publish elsewhere.
The three Highly Commended papers (in no particular order) are: Joanne Stubley's Bearing the Unbearable: Melancholia following Severe Trauma; John Wright's ‘Things are Changing for me…the Anger is still there but not the Hatred’. Some Reflections from Work with a Racist; and, finally, Looking into Later Life: Psychodynamic Observation and Old Age by Rachael Davenhill, Andrew Balfour, Margaret Rustin, Martin Blanchard and Kate Tress.
Our congratulations to all these authors of excellent papers. Judging the best was indeed a difficult task. I hope that our readers enjoy reading them as much as we did.