Editorial

The BJP is very pleased to present a group of papers on theoretical orientations and their implications for clinical work, across this and the next two issues of the Journal. The papers derive from a series of presentations by senior clinicians at the British Association of Psychotherapists in 2009. As Kay Marles and Sally Rose put it in their Introduction to ‘Essentially Ours, Specifically …’, giving an account of the provenance of the project: ‘Could we listen to each other's approaches and ways of working in a spirit of receptivity and curiosity, or would our attachments to our own trainings and our convictions about our own orientations prove a stumbling block to open conversation and open minds?’ Each paper provides readers with an opportunity to immerse themselves in the idiom of a different approach - in this issue, Contemporary Freudian, Winnicottian, and Jungian. (The next issue will include papers on Klein and Anna Freud; the subsequent issue, papers on the Independent Tradition and on Internal Cohabitation.) The clinical work presented here ranges from long analyses in private practice, to weekly and short-term work in private practice, to weekly work in an outpatient perinatal psychiatric setting. Each paper offers a detailed account of how the clinician talked to their patient, and how the clinical exchanges were understood on reflection. In each case, it is possible to discern the links between an underlying theoretical stance and a clinical emphasis.

Importantly, all the authors acknowledge what one could call the mutuality of analytic work. Anne-Marie Sandler, in a paper on the Contemporary Freudian approach co-authored with Joan Schachter, writes of the British Psychoanalytical Society thus: ‘we are constantly exposed to a variety of psychoanalytical approaches and … we are all influenced by this … we bring our own tendencies and private theories to our clinical work so that I cannot pledge that what I am presenting here will be recognized by all as