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One of the main sources of the social defence paradigm, the subject of Armstrong and Rustin’s edited book, is Isabel Menzies Lyth’s paper from 1960, which describes her ground-breaking study of counter-therapeutic dynamics in a hospital nursing service (Menzies Lyth, 1960). I first read this seminal work a few years into my career as a clinical psychologist working in adult and forensic mental health services in the NHS. It created such a strong sense of recognition in me of the sometimes paradoxical and disturbing interactions I observed around me, both between staff and in staff’s dealings with patients, that I wished I had read it much sooner. As a result, I have given the paper as set reading to clinical psychology trainees now for over a decade, and the continued relevance of Menzies Lyth’s observations and her concept of the social defence system is regularly confirmed for me by their enthusiastic responses.
The contributors to ‘Social Defences Against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm’, also pay homage to the enduring explanatory power of the social defence paradigm. The volume originated in a symposium at St John’s College in 2013, the aim of which was to breathe new life into the model by considering it in the light of developments in theory and practice, both within the world of psychoanalysis and in the context of broader social and cultural changes. The book consists of an introductory chapter by the editors, which describes the advances in psychoanalytic thinking that most influence the papers that follow, as well as salient aspects of the changes in the nature of institutions and in the wider environment, particularly the development of global communications and the global market economy. The articles are organised into four sections; the first is theoretical, and the following three collect applications of Menzies Lyth’s ideas in the fields of healthcare, the private sector, and social work and education, respectively.
The papers vary in terms of the