Editor's Comments

I recently mentioned a meeting with the Journal's Reviewing Panel designed to help us consider priorities for the next period, ‘and to look at how we can enhance the Journal’ (BJP 31(4), November 2015, p. 417). It is appropriate that two such enhancements are represented in this issue, at the start of the year and of a new volume. One is signalled at the end of these Comments. Under the heading ‘New Writers/New Voices’ we are inviting ‘the next generation of psychotherapists’ to put forward work for publication. We hope that readers who have perhaps not published before, or are at an early stage of their clinical career, will see the BJP as a receptive space for the development of their ideas, and of a distinctive personal voice. The other is a development of the BJP's role as a journal for theoretical innovation. In a significant theoretical intervention in the psychoanalytic debate on morality, Coline Covington considers whether there may be ‘an idea of “right” and “wrong” that precedes the tenets of the group’, proposing that our sense of morality is based on our ‘initial perception of ourselves, as mirrored by the observing ego’.

A subtle interweaving of clinical and theoretical considerations links the next four papers. Detailed and evocative clinical material is included in each one. Federica Facchin considers ‘fuzzy contemporary clinical phenomena’ - those that defy traditional classification - in terms of Lacan's classical teaching on neurosis and psychosis, and contemporary Lacanian theories focused more on the notions of ‘jouissance, suppletion and ordinary psychosis’. Gilly Stiffell and Ralph Holtom contrast the classical perception of narcissism, in which ‘total disregard is shown for others’, with the ‘obverse position where the narcissist seems to be seeking relatedness by making seductive efforts to attract others into collusion with their needs’. They focus their discussion on the latter. Rooting his discussion of work with schizoid patients in materi