Editorial

The effect of a research programme on the psychotherapeutic relationship while under research raises anxieties in the therapists. Jenny Firth, David Shapiro and Glenys Parry have taken those worries seriously and describe the kinds of problems that the demands of a research programme give rise to. The conclusion that such reality factors as the research imposes, can be dealt with as any other reality factor in the course of a treatment, is in fact reassuring, and suggests that the caution with which most psychotherapists approach research has as much to do with the therapist's phantasies as with the patient's - a seemingly more threatening eventuality. And one which creates the rift between practitioners and researchers. The evidence that research can attend to the extreme sensitivity of the therapeutic encounter is heartening as it must go some way to dispel the anxiety that research inevitably introduces unmanageable artefacts into the treatment, and the expectation that the individuality of each patient and his treatment has in the course of the research to be reduced to a tabulated series of non-individual regularities and conformities.

It is perhaps true also that psychotherapists regard the individuality of each patient as a research task in itself each time a new treatment is started. And every patient is a source of learning for each psychotherapist all through his career. It is one of the essential attractions of psychotherapy, that there are always new challenges to face. Routinization does not set in, in our work. This is why so often the publication of a single case study is warranted. Joan Hunter's application of brief psychotherapy to an elderly person's bereavement, is an unusual challenge. In itself a single case prompts the possibility of a new field of development.

Brief psychotherapy is also commented on by Angela Molnos, whose report on a recent conference, emphasizes the curious ascendency of Davanloo's approach which seems to alternately inspire