Editorial

In the last year, the Editorial Board and I have been working on a revision of the Journal's Aims and Scope statement. It had been unchanged since the Journal was founded in the 1980s, and through a process of iteration we sought a form of wording that would replenish the Journal's vision, encompassing the many changes that have taken place in analytic psychotherapy in the last 25 years. The statement, which is now available on the BJP pages of the Wiley-Blackwell website, retains the Journal's original clinical focus on individual, group and institutional practice. At the same time, it places new emphasis on a dialogue between ‘private practice and institutionally based practice’, with its ‘differing potentials and constraints’, its different unconscious dynamics. We welcome theoretical papers and reflective research papers; acknowledge the changing regulatory context for our work; and reaffirm the Journal's traditional attention to professional, historical, cultural and political issues.

Many of these themes are reflected in this issue. We begin with Linda Buckingham's far-reaching theoretical reconsideration of projective identification. Arguing that confusions have accumulated in the uses and meanings of the term through the work of Bion and Ogden, she proposes ‘a return to Melanie Klein's original concept which focuses on the mental activity of the person in whose mind the projective identification takes place’. The paper is illustrated with vignettes from her practice as a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist.

Turning to the dynamic between individual and institutional practice, a variety of perspectives on individual work in the consulting room are represented. Anna Bravesmith, within a Jungian tradition and with a particular focus on the transcendent function, sensitively explores the ‘interplay between silence and speech’, recording and illustrating a number of types of silence: ‘defensive, hostile, entrenched … creative, enriching’. Angela King, f