Editorial

The ‘mental pain of minorities’, in Salman Akhtar's words (Akhtar, 2014), was the theme of the opening paper in the last issue of the BJP. In the first paper in this issue, in our Clinical Practice strand, Christine Thornton and Alan Corbett examine the work of Immigrant Counselling and Psychotherapy, a clinic for Irish people in Britain run on psychoanalytic and group-analytic principles. With a focus on the interpenetration and interaction of different ‘axes of trauma’, and with sensitive attention to the many meanings of the word ‘home’ (including its fantasied dimension), their paper illustrates a number of the issues addressed in Akhtar's paper. The authors' presentation of the psychosocial dynamics of immigration is complemented by three case studies. ‘The “wrong word” or look from [the patient's] therapist’, to take one example, ‘can still cause the consulting room to become the hate-filled home he was placed into as a baby’. It is an imaginative account of painstaking work.

With this issue of the Journal we complete the publication of seven papers from the ‘Essentially Ours…Specifically’ series. Anne Tyndale and Viqui Rosenberg consider the Independent Tradition; Michael Sinason and Joscelyn Richards explicate the principles of Internal Cohabitation, a more recent theoretical model. In a thoughtful account, Tyndale and Rosenberg see the Independent tradition as focused on ‘listening, to create an environment in which the patient can make his own self-discoveries’. Interpretations are of course made, but ‘all interventions from the analyst are with the purpose of providing space and safety in which the patient may grow in order to become fully alive.’ Similarly, the Independent emphasis on ‘ordinary language’ is intended to imbue this language with ‘psychoanalytic ways of thinking which the patient can then use for himself.’ Sinason and Richards then systematically present the ‘reasons for viewing the conflicts of inner mental life as arising from the problema