Editorial

Just as the previous issue of the Journal began in the external world, so too does this issue, my last as Editor. In her thoughtful and wide-ranging Introduction to ‘On Brief Psychotherapy’, Jan Lee makes the point that the proliferation of time-limited work in both public and private settings in the last decade is ‘primarily a reflection of changing socio-economic forces and managerial fashions in mental health provision’. She then poses the question ‘how do patients and psychotherapists feel about it?’ With her image of the ‘energetic engagement with evanescence and the flow of life that makes brief work so rewarding’, she paves the way for a clinically vivid set of contributions from Ann Kutek, Gertrud Mander, Mia Beaumont and Louise Lyon. The specificities and nuances of the encounters, be they in private or public settings, allow for reflection on a range of theoretical questions which naturally centre on the extent to which work in the transference can be or should be undertaken, but are not limited to this. The appropriate mental stance of the clinician doing brief work is considered by all writers. Transference to the institution is also considered, as are interdisciplinary dynamics when the work takes place in primary care - the setting of Anna Bravesmith's paper, which convincingly charts the work needed, in a particularly testing case, to foster ‘an interdisciplinary approach which reduces patients' attempts to create damaging splits in the practice’.

We leave the organizational complexity of the external world a little to one side in ‘Clinical Practice’. Fiona Gardner's sensitive discussion of parental narcissism and its psychic effects returns the reader to the inner world of families of origin. Her focus is ‘the implications for growing up with a parent who can be seen as narcissistically disturbed in the sense of their consistent inability to relate to the emotional needs of the child, and to realize the child as a person in their own right’. Presentin