EDITORIAL

I am pleased to bring to your attention Paul Terry's paper, Dangerous liaisons: Psychosis and violence – working in a psychiatric intensive care unit, which was this year's winner of the Annual Clinical Essay Prize, awarded by the Educational Trust of the APP, and is published in this issue. Terry describes his therapeutic work with potentially violent patients and his understanding of their violence as an attempt to manage overwhelming states of annihilation anxiety. The sometimes frightening clinical situations he presents and his psychoanalytic understanding of these encounters illustrate very well the containment for both patient and clinician that psychoanalytic thinking can provide.

This was the third year of the Essay Prize. To give you a sense of the breadth of papers which have won so far, last year's winner was Liv Darling's paper on psychoanalytically informed work with interpreters, in a child and adolescent mental health department, and in 2003, Ian Thurston's paper about developing a therapeutic alliance in an acute day hospital. In general, the papers which have been submitted for the prize have covered a wide range of public service, and have been of a high standard. It has been difficult each year to chose one paper over others, but most have subsequently been published in the journal.

The closing date for next year's Essay Prize is 31 December 2005 and the winner will be announced at the 2006 Annual General Meeting of the APP (details about how to submit are inside the back cover of this issue). I would like to take this opportunity to encourage APP members to finish that paper which you have drafted or presented, or which you may have constructed only in your mind, and submit it for the Essay Prize. I look forward to the very great pleasure I and the other members of the judging panel, and eventually our readers, will get from reading it.

Maureen Marks

Editor