Editor's Comments

Regular readers will be aware that the publication of the ‘Essentially Ours, Specifically…’ papers on different theoretical orientations, across three issues of the BJP in 2014, was followed by Joe Schwartz's complementary collection on Attachment in May 2015. The publication of the Attachment papers was accompanied by an invitation to extend the series by developing other groups of papers in the same format: theoretical accounts of the model, that would then be illustrated by clinical material. In response, Alan Corbett approached the Journal, wondering if we might be interested in papers ‘looking at the birth and development of psychotherapy with patients with intellectual disabilities’, and proposing specific authors and topics. The Editorial Board and I welcomed this approach. He and I had an exchange about whether the theme of disability constituted an orientation (as such), or an approach to clinical phenomena. It was both, for him, as he said in an email: ‘It evolved as a response, but has at its heart a certain clinical approach that marks it out.’ Alan brought poise, discipline and commitment to this project throughout the eighteen months of its development, all the more remarkable given the illness he was suffering at the time. The ‘certain clinical approach that marks it out’ is precisely delineated in his editorial Introduction to the compelling papers by Valerie Sinason, Tamsin Cottis and Brett Kahr that follow. Very sadly, Alan Corbett died on 22 December 2016, while this issue of the Journal was in production; he did however see the proofs, a source of solace for those of us who knew him and knew how important the BJP project was to him. Brett Kahr's Appreciation of him will be published in our next issue.

I am grateful to Colin Campbell and Ann Horne for their editorial work on the disability psychotherapy papers.

Research - both formal and informal - is represented in the issue also. In the formal arena, Jan McGregor Hepburn is currently researching ‘