Editor's Comments

With this issue of the Journal we are marking its founder Bob Hinshelwood's 80^thbirthday in December this year, and we wanted to record this significant moment in a variety of ways. We offer an interview with him about the Journal and its history, a group of personal tributes, and a debate around his work on psychoanalytic research. In a candid interview, he says he will offer ‘rambling free associations - but what could be more appropriate?’, and the reader learns much, among other things, about the clinical and political context in which the BJP was formed. The ten tributes that follow, from national and international colleagues, provide a personal glimpse of Bob's capacity for close engagement and for the development of shared projects.

Then, in ‘Psychoanalytic research: Personal reflections’, Bob Hinshelwood argues for the importance of clinical research ‘on the couch’. He explores the question of subjectivity ‘in contrast to the bedrock of objectivity in the natural sciences’; and the question of single-case research as opposed to large-sample research, within psychoanalysis. We have three responses to the paper. Anna Ursula Dreher, warmly recognizing that Hinshelwood is ‘one of the rare bridge-builders between psychoanalytic theory traditions as well as between research traditions’, supports the analytic situation ‘as core, as context of discovery as well as context of justification’, but does not regard the hypothetico-deductive logic of experiment as a suitable paradigm for research on the couch. Stephen Briggs also acknowledges Hinshelwood's work as ‘monumental in developing clarity and focusing on re-evaluating the basis of psychoanalytic knowledge’. Writing from a social science perspective, he acknowledges the ‘powerful lure’ of physics, but argues both that psychoanalysis ‘has characteristics of, and makes contributions to, social sciences’, and that ‘changing contexts affect practice profoundly’. In my own Response I write as the current editor of the J