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Psychotherapy, medicine and the body: A tribute to the work of Alexis Brook

This special edition of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy gathers together papers and contributions from the Alexis Brook Memorial Conference, held at the Tavistock Centre, London in October 2008. Alexis Brook was an extraordinary man, both personally and professionally, whose innovative work touched the lives of many and continues to inspire clinicians to this day. In organizing this one-day conference our aim was 2-fold. We wanted to celebrate and honour the breadth and depth of his work as a fitting memorial to his life, and were delighted that many of his family and former colleagues were able to attend. We also wanted to share his creativity and wisdom in a stimulating academic event, and let his insights and enthusiasm inspire a new generation of clinicians who might never have met or heard of him – or of psychotherapy. We therefore invited speakers for the second half of the conference to present current thinking and clinical work with psychosomatic disorders, building on Brook’s pioneering development of this field. We aimed to attract delegates from a range of specialities and disciplines reflecting the diversity of his influence. Delegates did indeed come from an extraordinary range of professional disciplines, reflecting his links with ophthalmology, general practice, coloproctology and gastroenterology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, occupational health and nursing. Seldom indeed have professors of surgery and medicine, esteemed nurses, retired and current GPs and many others, spoken at a public conference at the Tavistock Clinic! We are fortunate in being able to publish most of the conference papers in this special edition, reflecting the important themes as they developed through the day. We began with an introduction by Nick Temple, former Chief Executive of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, who had supported setting up the conference in recognition of Brook’s invaluable contribution to the work of the Tavistock as consultant psychiatrist and Chair. Temple outlined significant areas of Brook’s work in general practice, ophthalmology and gastroenterology. He drew particular attention to Brook’s unassuming and warm style that both won the confidence of medical and surgical staff, and enabled them to hear and use his psychoanalytic thinking to understand their patients and explore their own reactions without becoming defensive. In presenting psychoanalytic ideas in ordinary language accessible to clinicians with little knowledge of psychiatry or psychoanalysis, Temple believes Brook represented the best tradition of the