Editorial

We are delighted to welcome you to Volume One of the thirty-first edition of Existential Analysis, which is also the first volume of a new decade.

It opens with six papers which were presented at the 2018 SEA Annual Conference, the theme of which was 'Movement, Music and Metaphor'. Each author takes the opportunity, in their various ways, to respond to the invitation 'to be lyrical and poetic, to be in motion and explore new ways of communicating, to stretch your language, your body, your ears, your knowledge, your practice'. Stuart Hanscomb, then, compares punk music and culture with existential philosophy and literature, and Marion Steel considers how the work of French philosopher Simone Weil, particularly in her writing on the nothingness at the heart of Being, might inform our existential therapeutic practice. Jamie McNulty, meanwhile, explores Heidegger's concept of the 'site' and its implications for his understanding of poetry. While the focus of each paper is divergent, each author contributes to our understanding of the relationship between existential therapy and the arts, broadly conceived. We will include further papers from the Conference in the July volume of this Journal.

This first section also includes a paper by Monia Brizzi bringing phenomenology into dialogue with the performing arts which she presented at the Society for Existential Analysis Seminar on Phenomenology and the Arts in November 2019, and the second and concluding part of Richard Swann's paper, which he gave at the 2018 Annual Conference, in which he uses the technique of scenario planning to consider how Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and advancing medical science are shaping new ways to think about the ontology of Dasein.

There follow three further papers: in the first Marc Bush uses the work of Eugène Minkowski to explore a client's experiences of being-out-of-time; in the next Karol Mausch and Ewa Ryś present the results of their empirical research on 'existential fulfilment', religiousness, values and mental health. We conclude our papers with Sections V-VIII of Miles Groth's Boss Bibliography, the first part of which can be found in the July 2019 number of this Journal.

We close this volume, as usual, with a series of learned book reviews; the authors have in many cases taken the opportunity to contribute pieces which themselves are as informative and thought-provoking as the formal papers which precede them. Our thanks to Ondine Smulders for editing this section. Please do contact her if you would like to review any titles from our list of publications received for review.

Simon du Plock
Martin Adams