Editorial

Following on from two papers in the last issue on the limits of psychotherapy, in this issue we publish two papers, by Mike Power and by Peter Fonagy, forming a section on the relations between psycho-analytic psychotherapy and cognitive therapy. One a cognitive therapist and one a psycho-analyst, they achieve a considerable degree of agreement! If one concedes that cognitive therapy lacks a good theory of aetiology or causation, the other acknowledges that elements of practice, suspiciously like cognitive therapy, seem to creep into the work of a practising psycho-analyst. This is an honourable co-operativeness. Nilman and Lewin also describe a combining of techniques in their successful treatment of a latency age child. Using dramatic techniques with a boy who had lost a needed object, they were able to restore his ‘whole object capacity’ to love. The problem is: how does such a mixture work, how does it effect the patient if contrasting styles, ideas lie side by side.

Adding to the hopeful atmosphere of integration in Psychotherapy, is the reminder of the developments at ‘Rugby’ (wherever it is) in Mike Pokorny's address from the Chair at last January's Conference. Though rumblings from the Conference echo in the Correspondence section.

How to use the material is a question asked by Nathan Field in attending to the responses he gets from his body. One might wonder if in fact the body, in spite of all the medical knowledge of physiology, functions much more mysteriously for each individual even than his own mind. Perhaps it seems so for those with serious and long-term pathology like the diabetics treated by Jane Milton, who are daily presented with their wayward bodily functions. It is that border land period of development, when the infant is sorting out that basic space-time framework which our minds use, that Andrea Sabbadini focusses in on. He states the classical framework for thinking about the development of that mental framework, and uses it to study how de