Editor's Comments

In my last Comments I mentioned the BJP's new emphasis on its role as a journal for theoretical innovation. We consolidate in this issue with an adjustment to our Aims and Scope statement, agreed at a recent meeting of the Journal's Editorial Board (see opposite). We have traditionally said: ‘We welcome theoretical papers’. We are now saying that ‘We welcome theoretical papers, especially where there is theoretical innovation’ (my italics), and hope this will encourage readers to offer work which develops psychoanalytic thinking of this kind.

Relatedly, an adjustment to the Journal's usual section heading ‘Clinical Practice’, now ‘Clinical and Theoretical Practice’, underlines the importance of a dialectic between clinical and theoretical thinking. This dialectic is illustrated in the first two papers in the issue. Alistair Sweet and Ian Miller address an importantly under-theorized area of the addictions, ‘bingeing on sobriety’ - periods of abstinence which ‘may also represent a type of binge-like behaviour which satisfies, for a time, core needs’, and which they discuss in terms of black and white holes, locating their discussion in terms of earlier uses of these terms in the analytic literature. Sharon Gil, in a candid clinical account, looks at the paradox of a therapeutic relationship where there is a history of sexual abuse: how can therapeutic relatedness ‘sustain maternal concern when, at the same time, the therapeutic couple is unconsciously forced to re-enact elements of an unforgiving past?’ Winnicott's distinction between concern of guilt and concern of joy provides an overarching framework for Gil's discussion.

An understanding of mentalization, both as theoretical development and as clinical practice, was the theme of a recent joint conference between the Freud Museum and the Journal; I introduce the conference papers later in the issue (pp. 187-8). Here I want to acknowledge the importance of the Journal's link with the Museum. Joint conferences between