Editorial

The BJP, standing as it does at the interface between BCP and UKCP, occupies a unique place in the landscape of the profession which it seeks to reflect, entertain and inform. After six months in the editorial eyrie, I've been considering the future direction of the BJP - what do I want, what does the Board want, what do readers of the Journal want? And what do we need? What can the Journal offer that might help our profession mature? Conceptual development, clinical adventures, defining and refining of theories, clear and creative thinking and … what else?

I should very much like to hear from anyone who has thoughts and suggestions about this because over the next months we shall be trying our wings and looking into various possibilities both at home and abroad. We are developing a section on ‘Addictive States of Mind’, for which we invite submissions and I hope to commission a regular Letter from America and perhaps an American issue. Next year will be the 150^th anniversary of Freud's birth and 60 years since the first appearance of the paranoid-schizoid position in ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ . We welcome papers and occasional pieces, including poems and artworks, on these or other 2006 anniversary themes. Our next issue will consider aspects of Masculinity under the paternal eye of guest editor Karl Figlio and from time to time we shall be inviting other guest editors to collaborate on special themed issues. If you have suggestions for themes, again, please write to me.

In this issue we present you with a delicious feast of papers, opening with Kenneth Wright's lyrical exposition of the poetic and therapeutic uses of language to convey living experience. Laurence Spurling gives an account of using combined individual and group therapy in work with borderline patients and Jane Polden revisits the drive to reparation and the forms it might take. Lord Alderdice applies psychoanalytic thinking to the origins of terrorism from his extensive experience of workin