Editorial

In time-honoured tradition, this collection of papers reflects something of the extraordinary nature of psychoanalytic thinking and its therapeutic potential. It also explores the nature of its role, position and standing within the wider therapeutic community. We start with Jean Knox, who rises robustly to the challenge reflected by recent research into the necessary conditions for diversity within psychoanalytic thinking to become a factor of creativity and progress (Jimenez 2008). The author continues her published work in this area, focusing on the need for a broader, more integrated vision of what constitutes, contributes to and facilitates ‘the analytic relationship’. Identifying the way in which each of the traditional psychoanalytic and Jungian models has effectively concentrated on differing rather than mutually exclusive aspects of the psyche and its process, she lays the groundwork for a rich drawing together in her paper. Within this are not only these different traditions, but also their newer North American relational counterpart, as well as divergent neuroscientific, developmental and attachment theory perspectives. The article illustrates, with the aid of a cross-paradigm grid and clinical vignettes, how all these can work together concurrently and even simultaneously, enriching each other in the fostering of a creative developmental process within the analytic dyad. Challenging us to question the security of our own chosen theoretical positions, in favour of more creative and inclusive discourses, the paper illuminates the way in which false divisions and political demarcations may have come to limit our overall vision of the psychotherapeutic endeavour.

The next four papers take up, among other things and in differing ways, the question of the father. In his beautiful paper, ‘Family Romances’, Freud quotes the old legal tag: ‘“pater semper incertus est” [paternity is always uncertain], while the mother is “certissima” [certain]’ (1909, p. 239). This