Introduction

The idea of having a section in this issue and the next, entitled ‘Australia: Clinical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives’ came out of discussions that Ann Scott and I had about our experiences of separately visiting Australia in 1998. Our visits had had a powerful impact upon us, and we both wanted to make more widely known a little of what we encountered. In the next issue, Ann Scott will continue the Australian section with material being developed from work presented at a conference on ‘Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives’ in Sydney in May 1998.

In this issue there are two papers, one that looks back and gives a vivid and personal account about psychoanalysis in the 1950s in Australia. And the other paper is about original work that is currently being done with mothers and children in Melbourne. I felt there was something we could learn from the past and present Australian experience of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. We all have a tendency to believe that our own institutional practices embody ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’, and psychotherapy seems particularly vulnerable to this weakness. It was therefore very invigorating to be reminded that psychotherapeutic teaching and practice can change and adapt. It is a cliche to speak of the vast spaces between the cities in Australia, but there was something refreshingly original in the way in which the Australian Psychotherapy Trainings and Services have been forced to think about the resources that are to hand. For instance, if the therapist that you want to supervise your work lives 3000 miles away, you set up telephone supervision. But it is not only trainings that have adapted to the environment, but the therapeutic work has stretched into the communities in interesting ways. The first paper, ‘Synergy of Verbal and Non-verbal Therapies in the Treatment of Mother-Infant Relationships’ by Helga Coulter and Elizabeth Loughlin, working in Melbourne, is a challenging account of the combination of dance therapy and psy