Editor's Comments

‘I get drawn back into feeling we've achieved nothing, it's pointless, I'm wasting her time, I'm not good enough, she's stuck’, writes the author of the clinical material in this issue's Clinical Commentary. The patient is a woman in her fifties, initially referred ‘as her marriage was failing during infertility treatment’. We meet her when she has been in three-times weekly work on the couch for several years. Mark Budden and Ann Horne tell us, in introducing this richly rewarding piece, that all three commentators are qualified in both child and adult psychotherapy. This gives their comments a dual perspective, which encompasses both the developmental and the here-and-now of transference and countertransference, as well as the literature of both child and adult work.

We are delighted to publish the first article in our ‘New Voices’ section. The section has been carefully nurtured by Emma Letley and is designed, as we say in our Call for Papers for the section, to encourage writers to come forward - ‘new, early career writers, and those who may not yet have published but have significant experience to share with BJP readers’. Emma is working with a number of authors on the development of their papers and we expect to be presenting this work on a regular basis. (Readers may be interested to know that the papers, once ready for submission to the Journal, go through rigorous peer review and revision, as with all work published in the Journal.) In this issue, Anne Kane takes up the conscious and unconscious implications for disabled people of any change in the law on assisted suicide. As Kane acknowledges, assisted suicide is ‘not, in theory, specific to disabled people’, but ‘brings some of the psychosocial dynamics around impairment and disability into focus’. Making use of her significant experience and understanding of the field, she offers a thought-provoking and profoundly serious account of the topic.

We then turn to the work of one of the most distinguished contr