Bernardine Bishop, the great-granddaughter of the poet Alice Meynell, was one of the witnesses from the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960. After writing two early novels, she taught in a London comprehensive school for ten years and then went on to have a distinguished career as a psychotherapist, during which time she was a member of the London Centre for Psychotherapy and of the Lincoln Centre for Psychotherapy. Cancer forced her retirement in 2010 and thereafter she returned to her first love, fiction. Angela Foster had a career in social work and higher education before training as a psychotherapist. She has a private practice and is a partner in Foster Roberts Cardona, which provides organizational consultancy and professional development services. She teaches at the Tavistock Clinic and has published widely in the field of mental health. Josephine Klein was an academic for the first twenty years of her professional life and then a psychotherapist in private practice, now retired. She is a Fellow of the London Centre for Psychotherapy and was until recently a member of the British Association of Psychotherapists. Victoria O'Connell comes from a background of working with children and adolescents who have emotional difficulties and is now a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice.

• The London Centre for Psychotherapy -- Introduction -- Mechanisms and mysteries -- Love, the aesthetic conflict and the self -- The emerging religious dimension of knowing in psychoanalysis -- Therapy by design: style in the therapeutic encounter -- Narcissism, the mystics' remedy

'The therapeutic elements this collection deals with may be elusive, but they are also eminently practical. Stephen Mendoza (following Bion) writes on "faith", Josephine Klein on the importance of true "recognition" for the patient; others write on the consequences of the baby's experience of the mother's beauty. These therapists venture to look into a more affirmative territory, most of it impeccably psychoanalytic but hitherto obscured, perhaps, by Freud's celebrated pessimism. The result is a courageous and original collection of papers, which offer a great deal of "food for thought".'- David M. Black, British Psycho-Analytical Society