Editor's Comments

This issue of the Journal opens with a situation that may be easily recognizable in our clinical work, taking into account, of course, the uniqueness of the individual case: an ‘intractable refusal to do what would be needed to grow’. Our Clinical Commentary author presents work with a 21-year-old male student whose father died suddenly when he was three years old. The young man ‘seemed very stuck, not getting any of his college work done, while buying off his tutors (and trying to buy off himself and me) with promises’. The therapist sees their job as being to ‘excavate the desperation below the surface’ of the intractable refusal. It would be impossible to summarize the complexity of the commentators’ responses to this engaging, candid account, but some key observations stand out: the idea of ‘a deficit in his relationship with himself which needs to be repaired’ (Richard Carvalho); the suggestion that we are seeing ‘a defensive system crumbling…exposing the traumatic burden of grief which has been obscured for so long’ (Jane Cheshire); a focus on the developmental, with the patient ‘longing to have had a vigorous active father with whom he could identify’ (Meg Errington).

When the judges and I read the work submitted for the Rozsika Parker Prize each year, our focus is always on the question of creativity - whether this be creativity of topic, or creativity of expression; in all cases, whether we are seeing the new, the unexpected, the different. It is naturally a pleasure to publish the two Commended papers in the 2018 competition, both in the Post-Qualification Path. In a sensitive, imaginative account, Toby Ingham considers the power of remembered nightmares to ‘aid work and understanding’, particularly where the history may have been traumatic, with much that has been forgotten. Naftally Israeli, in a closely argued, subtle treatment of paradoxical representation, addresses ‘two disciplines that place special emphasis on creativity and the inner world - psycho