Editorial

Psychotherapy is conducted in many ways - from the meticulously precise, to the most intuitively various.

Jane Temperley's article discusses the variegated species of setting within which a common set of elements of good practice must survive, and describes the multiple pressures to diverge.

Psychotherapy has not been without its divergers. And the present landscape which this Journal now tries to scan is so complex it is hard for any one person to over-view it.

This issue of the Journal contains articles concerned with different theoretical and practical approaches. Dick Blackwell starts with a background in groupanalysis and seeks a theoretical rapprochement with system theory in the form of Bateson's bouble-dind theory. He draws practical conclusions about the problems of therapeutic communication within his particular setting. Eduardo Pitchon with a background in child psychotherapy is concerned with the practical problems that derive from transposing a strict technique to a setting in remedial education.

Angela Molnos has described a moment of critical development in her own theoretical approach to brief psychotherapy. In teaching the practice of it she found herself reformulating the framework for thinking about it. Such an intuitive moment is of importance for us since it exemplifies a moment of divergence.

Many psychotherapists have a repertoire of “techniques” which they employ as the occasion arises and if asked why, at a particular moment, they change technique the answer invariably boils down to a simple intuition. The problem is to know what validity such intuitions have.

There is an illustrious history within psychotherapy of “interpreting” divergences. Jones remarks on this painful and difficult topic, “When an analyst loses insight he had previously had, the recurring wave of resistance that has caused the loss is apt to display itself in the form of pseudoscientific explanations of the data before him, and this is then dignified with the name of a “new th