Editor's Comments

Since its inception, the BJP's Rozsika Parker Prize has given authors scope to address questions of creativity in clinical work or in the application of psychoanalytic thinking to culture and the arts. Both winners in the 2016 Prize, published in this issue, consider clinical questions through an aesthetic lens, doing so in an imaginative way that greatly impressed our Judges. Benjamin Robinson (Student Path) approaches the writing-up of sessions as a ‘challenge of representation’ that can be addressed with methods appropriated from aesthetic theory, allowing for a ‘free-flowing write-up of the session, both creatively rich and clinically accurate’. Sian Ellis (Post-Qualification Path) considers the multidirectional movement of transference and countertransference in the supervisory situation, this time with the supervisor as a ‘point of origin, rather than the recipient’ of these dynamics, and in particular in relation to a dimension of translucent space that values the space for ‘imagining and dreaming’.

Our Research strand offers a subtle account of a qualitative research enquiry in which both the researcher and the children of the research subjects have a visible physical disability. Clare Harvey argues that a ‘mindful use of intersubjective identifications between researcher and participant’ is needed in order to conduct ethical qualitative research; and further that this is made possible through consciously working with transference-countertransference processes.

Two papers follow, in our regular Clinical and Theoretical Practice strand. Alina Schellekes, in a rich meditation on time, suggests that ‘deciphering the way the patient experiences time (and space) gives us an additional key to primitive areas of the psyche which do not express themselves in the usual verbal or symbolic ways’. Hanoch Yerushalmi takes up the question of ‘spontaneous developmental changes’ within analytic therapy, compassionately placing these within the conceptual framework of the ‘two