During the 1970s the names Fritz Perls, Carl Rogers and Albert Ellis were all prominent, as were their schools of Gestalt, client centred and rational emotive therapies. Of these three celebrities only Albert Ellis continues to teach and extol the superiority of his particular therapy. This is not just because he has outlived his contemporaries but also because, as he rightly states on his recent European tour, rational emotive therapy is a legitimate challenge and competitor to the present schools of cognitive therapies of Beck, Gelder and others. To emphasise this point, Ellis commences his day-long one-man workshop by announcing that rational emotive therapy has been renamed rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT).

According to Kurt Lewin there is nothing so practical as a good theory. The Bridge Foundation Autumn Conference, which drew an audience from the Western psychotherapeutic diaspora ranging from Hereford to Torbay to hear three London psychoanalytic superstars speak about the treatment of borderline patients, provided a good opportunity to think about the relationship between theory and psychotherapeutic practice.

The President of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), Dr Jorge Costa de Silva, being Brazilian, this congress was the first to be held south of the equator and in a local winter. The choice of venue caused more then usual anticipatory anxiety because Rio, the largest of all tropical cities, accommodating ten million people who unify by calling themselves Cariocas but whose economic welfare is widely disparate, has a reputation for mugging rather than begging. In the event delegates were made so security conscious and the city administrators allocated so many hundreds of police to prevent trouble that there were only three or four materially untoward incidents. One story is that a delegate ventured to the beach wearing bathing trunks and sun glasses and returned with neither.