Editor's Comments

The new series of twice-yearly Clinical Commentaries is now established as a significant feature of the Journal. In this issue the narrative concerns once-weekly work with a 30-year-old female patient suffering from compulsive and obsessional neurosis. There is - naturally - close attention to the words spoken, the patient's inner stances, and, on this occasion, a difficult countertransference. The author of the clinical material writes that an intense transference developed, ‘as if we were a mother and child who were very close but in a claustrophobic way’. Our three respondents speak from interestingly different perspectives. The first, an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist, attends to this intensity as ‘indicative of the severity of an attachment trauma’; the second, from a Middle Group/Relational perspective, considers the possibility, among other things, that the therapist might be erring on the side of keeping the patient as a ‘fearful, dependent, fused child’; the third, within a Kleinian/object relations framework, focuses on the movement of object relations in the here-and-now of the session, noting the shift from ‘interruption’ to ‘development’ of the work.

In the last issue I mentioned the way in which winning authors in the 2016 Rozsika Parker Prize approached clinical questions through an aesthetic lens. This dual perspective is also found in Ian S. Miller's consideration of one- and two-person psychologies in reading and psychoanalysis, with particular reference to Samuel Beckett's work. This fine paper was Commended in the 2016 competition.

Our next paper, Nathan M. Szajnberg's detailed analysis of Winnicott's Piggle, published to mark the 40^th anniversary of the publication of the book on the case, follows the BJP‘s posthumous publication of Christopher Reeves’ two-part discussion of the case two years ago. In suggesting that there are Kleinian and Anna Freudian elements of technique in Winnicott's way of working, Szajnberg offers a comple