Editorial

‘Is psychodynamic psychotherapy only suitable for the middle-class elite?’ ask Guthrie, Moorey, Barker, Margison and McGrath in their paper on ‘Brief Psychodynamic-Interpersonal Therapy’. In most NHS psychotherapy departments and in voluntary organizations dealing with the deprived in inner city centres it is appalling to witness the cruelty and abuse that man inflicts on those he is close to and depends upon. Can psychotherapy alleviate this suffering? Can it bring about lasting change? And perhaps, the question that is most often asked today, can psychotherapy give some account of itself? These authors describe ‘a conversational model’ of brief eight-session therapy that concentrates on the ‘here and now’ of the relationship between therapist and patient. The sample is with three extremely damaged women for whom all other types of therapy have proved unsuccessful. The six-month followup questionnaire suggests that they all benefited from this encounter.

Perhaps the most persuasive way in which psychotherapy is, at present, giving an account of itself is in the work of attachment theory. Attachment theory has the possibility of a research methodology built into it. In Samuel Stein's paper, ‘Enuresis, Early Attachment and Intimacy’, he argues that attachment theory is well documented and that it is a good description of human development. He then takes a case of secondary enuresis in a 10-year-old boy and shows that a change in the maternal attachment of this young boy brought about a relief in his symptom.

The theme of the ‘intrapsychic’ versus the ‘interpsychic’ which was a theme in the last issue (BJP 15(1)) is spelt out in great detail by Stephen Mitchell in one of the papers given at the Fifth Annual John Bowlby Memorial Lectures. Stephen Mitchell in ‘Attachment Theory and the Psychoanalytic Tradition: Reflections on Human Relationality’ addresses the early conflict between the ‘attachment tradition’ and the ‘psychoanalytic tradition’, and the way in which we are