Editor's Comments

In this issue's vivid Clinical Commentary the focus is on a 32-year old male patient who ‘can never decide anything’, for whom every choice is ‘an agony and every decision the cause of months of futile regret’; and a therapist who feels ‘quite at a loss about how to proceed’ in the face of ‘the fury that rages inside him and will not leave him alone’. As always, the commentators take up specific aspects of the clinical situation in their responses: we see a Lacanian approach to diagnosis; a Jungian perspective on the child as a receptacle for a parent's unprocessed affects; and a BPA psychoanalyst's exploration of a pressure on the therapist to ‘stay on the surface’. Each engages deeply with the material.

The Journal is delighted to be publishing the papers and discussions from a symposium comparing Bion and Winnicott's clinical theories in Los Angeles in April 2017. This was an unusual symposium, combining a group relations workshop, on the one hand, with a traditional analytic conference structure, on the other. We publish the keynote papers and responses from Bob Hinshelwood and Lesley Caldwell (UK), and Robert Oelsner and Peter Goldberg (USA), respectively. This issue reports, importantly, on the group relations aspect as well. As the organizers, Joseph Aguayo and John Lundgren, ask in their Concluding Remarks: ‘Could we deepen our understanding of Bion and Winnicott by specifically focusing on their clinical approaches in both a group process as well as small theoretical discussion groups?’ The attendees came from many different analytic institutes and were able to set aside their institutional affiliations and become part of a free-standing temporary learning community. Aguayo and Lundgren would value feedback from BJP readers (‘a new inter-group’) about any issues raised by this account of the event and its structure, and I would very much encourage readers to share their responses (email addresses: p. 254). I would also like to thank Mark Budden, Ann Horne, a