Editorial

Psychoanalytic work exists in a liminal space, one that is neither fully private nor fully public. It is my intention, as the Journal's new editor, to promote debate about this space - in both the fine grain of the clinical encounter, and the wider setting of the work, both professionally and socio-culturally. I take up this role within a very established journal; longevity brings both security and the need for introspection about our task as a journal, a continuing examination of our project. Bob Hinshelwood's first announcements for the BJP, nearly 20 years ago, tell us that ‘The emphasis will be on clinically oriented papers which concern the technique of analytical psychotherapy or that have theoretical implications’; an emphasis that Jean Arundale, who has edited the Journal for the last eight years, retained and refined. Clinical work - its vignettes, its larger arc - will remain at the heart of the BJP: as one patient movingly said to her therapist, reported in this issue: ‘You stepped into my cancer world and stood alongside me’. Such personal, immediate speech touches us by its very simplicity. But interpretation of clinical speech will vary, and I want to maintain another founding impulse of the Journal: ‘it will attempt to confront the problems that beset communications between various schools using different terminologies.’ So the Journal will offer a continuing engagement with difference: differences in thinking, differences in understanding. And with the organizational dynamics of the profession, both in its formal structures - extending Bob Hinshelwood's early editorial point that ‘The political life of the profession has been gathering momentum over recent years’- and its informal ones. Each part of the Journal plays its part in this engagement - not only the main articles but the Personal Views, Review Essays, Book Reviews, Correspondence, Responses, Clinical Commentaries, and Abstracts from Other Journals. As does each member of the editorial board