Introduction

The history of brief therapy is as long as the history of psychotherapy itself. Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott and many other influential analysts all saw patients for short periods of time on contracts that varied in degree of clarity and structure. This practice was not seen as anything remarkable. Psychotherapy itself was still an inchoate field and brief therapy was not as yet defined as a particular strand amidst many new developments. In Britain brief therapy began to emerge as a separate discipline due to the ground-breaking work of Balint and Malan in the focal therapy workshops begun at the Tavistock during the 1950s. As their research into time-limited work became increasingly impressive, brief therapy began to develop as a specific area of expertise with its own issues, techniques and theories. Different models of brief therapy have since appeared representing almost every avenue of psychotherapeutic thought.

It seemed apposite to revisit brief therapy practices in this section, given that the last decade has seen a proliferation of time-limited work in public and private settings. Primarily a reflection of changing socio-economic forces and managerial fashions in mental health provision, this packaging and greater consumption of psychotherapy as a product may be seen either as a dumbing down or as a growing recognition of its usefulness, albeit in abridged form. Clearly brief therapy has arrived and is here to stay. But how do patients and psychotherapists feel about it?

The section explores this question, beginning with Clinical Commentary XXIII, which contains four pieces, and finishing with a paper by Anna Bravesmith in which she presents her brief work in a primary care setting, followed by a theoretical discussion. In the traditional format of the Clinical Commentary Section, authors are asked to write about an anonymous vignette. These provide a glimpse into the work of the therapeutic dyad but leave the psychotherapist without a voice. So, in a depar