Editorial

In this issue we are pleased to publish the Public Lecture given by Malcolm Pines on the occasion of the Arbours Association ‘coming of age’ in 1986. The occasion of the Arbours Lecture, held in the auspicious environs of the Royal Society of Medicine, marked, I suppose, the emergence from adolescent insecurity to an established place in the firmament of psychotherapy. As Malcolm Pines points out in his celebratory lecture, this is achieved not least by training their own students. The experiences of maturation in an organisation that has reached 15 years of age are of great interest to a fledgling organisation such as the British Journal of Psychotherapy.

The Journal is, of course, an infant as yet, struggling to establish itself in its own right and in its own way. And we might add, struggling with some success. With this issue we embark on the fourth year of publication. Perhaps it was to ape the older Arbours that the Journal too put on a Public Lecture (to be published in the next issue of the Journal), held also in the Royal Society of Medicine, perhaps hoping precociously to ape that sense of being established. If the numbers of people coming to that lecture are an indication, then the Journal is very much on the psychotherapy scene. We are heartened, too, by the number of papers submitted, and the numbers of subscription to the Journal which are taken out.

But not all institutions mature satisfactorily and Malcolm Pines echoes the long pointing finger of Emerson - “The institution is the length and shadow of one man”. Organisations traverse an inevitable but precarious path from a euphoric beginning hanging upon the charisma of a founding figure towards a solid and stodgy bureaucracy. This sad law of institutional life was mapped out meticulously by Weber. It is a process in which the founding ‘narcissistic core’ to the institution has to be grown out of, perhaps in an exact parallel to the problems addressed by Richard Kwiatkowski in the adolescent, strugglin