No abstract

This article examines activism in defence of the National Health Service (NHS), which emerges in the 1960s to defend local hospitals from closure. From the mid-1980s, a new form of campaigning developed, which sought to protect the Service nationally. Tracing this campaigning illuminates, first, that small groups played a significant role in negotiating political change, and in contributing to cultural change which, in turn, has become politically powerful. Second, this demonstrates that the 1980s were 'new times' in welfare politics, as Thatcher's changes fostered voluntary interest in information-led expertise, and a new vision of the NHS as a significant, much valued, national institution.

This article addresses the research finding that there is a relative absence of empathic inquiry regarding patients' religious experiences in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. D. Stern's (1985) concept of selective attunement and J. Benjamin's (1988) assertionrecognition processes are used to understand and offer hypotheses about this absence and its consequences. We argue that selective attunement to and recognition of the patient's religious experiences communicates a prohibition to the patient. We hypothesize that the results of this process are that religious expressions are excluded from the intersubjective area; patients associate shame or guilt with their religious representations; and patients will not assert significant and meaning-laden religious experiences, which may lead to nonintegration of aspects of the self.During a discussion many months ago we noted and collectively wondered about the absence of religious discourse in analytically oriented psychotherapy. We had a suspicion that religious concepts are rarely used, understood, and explored in clinical case studies. In other words, we believed that

This article traces the emergence of child abuse as a medical concern in post-war Britain and America. In the early 1960s American paediatricians and radiologists defined the ‘battered child syndrome’ to characterise infants subjected to serious physical abuse. In the British context, paediatricians and radiologists, but also dermatologists and ophthalmologists, drew upon this work and sought to identify clear diagnostic signs of child maltreatment. For a time, the x-ray seemed to provide a reliable and objective visualisation of child maltreatment. By 1970, however, medical professionals began to invite social workers and policy makers to aid them in the diagnosis and management of child abuse. Discourse around the ‘battered child syndrome’, specifically, faded away, whilst concerns around child abuse grew. The battered child syndrome was a brief phenomenon of the 1960s, examination of which can inform the histories of medical authority, radiology and secrecy and privacy in the post-war period.