Editor's Comments

It goes without saying that clinical thinking is deepened by being located within contemporary or historical debates over theory. This principle, so familiar to us, is richly illustrated in the papers in this issue of the BJP; each has its specific starting point, its own network of reference.

The issue opens with Marina Gulina and Vera Dobrolioubova's thought-provoking exploration, in our Research strand, of the lived experience of bilingual psychotherapists. Noting Freud's view of the analytic process as a process of translation, the authors scrutinize their interview data with both theoretical linguistics and the psychoanalytic approach to interpretation in mind. Participants' responses concerning ‘cultural background, behavioural nuances, vocabulary, the music of speech, meanings, feelings, symbolism, and communications’ will enable readers to reflect further on this most complex of settings.

The four papers in our regular Clinical and Theoretical Practice strand focus on different aspects of the clinical encounter. Leezah Hertzmann's vivid contribution seeks a ‘deeper understanding of the difficulties with conscious and unconscious same gender sexual desires in psychoanalytic psychotherapy’. As she says, while the paper's theoretical focus is on lesbian relationships in relation to the oedipal mother, ‘the relevance of the ideas…for other gender pairings is explored’. Next, and working within a Kleinian and post-Kleinian framework, Raman Kapur poses the evocative question: what emotional experience settles a disturbed frame of mind, a mind dominated by ‘chaos, fragmentation and feelings of “falling to pieces”?’. Kapur looks at the impact of his interpretations on the patient's state of mind, always returning to the dynamic of ‘what to say and do (or not say and do) next’. Jack Nathan, in a valuable development of earlier, co-authored work on ‘benign authority’ in work with severe borderline patients, roots his discussion in the work of Kernberg on limit-setting a