Editor's Comments

As in any quarterly journal, everything in this issue was in development, was finalized, and went into production before the global coronavirus crisis took hold. I am writing these Comments six days after the UK went into lockdown; when you read them, the situation may be different again. Right now, perhaps all one can do is acknowledge that this is where we are, in our clinical communities and within our wider cultures. I cannot recall a time when a concern with maintaining mental health, in the face of a health crisis, was so central a feature of government and public health messaging. The emergency has already changed the way we work - from the couch and face-to-face, to phone and online. Our professional organizations are active in providing guidance; we are in debate with colleagues about the impact on the work and how to think about its meaning at a deeper level. ‘Keep safe’ and ‘Stay well and safe’ have become routine as a way of ending texts and emails. The Journal's correspondence with authors and reviewers now references the emergency, as we recognize how it changes our workflow … and our capacity to work.

And yet work can be steadying, so let me now turn to this issue of the Journal. Tirril Harris and her colleagues rightly state, at the outset of an important paper on practitioner-based research: ‘Psychotherapists continue to be wary of researchers who enter the clinical domain and their methodologies, which can seem opaque and alien to clinical practice.’ The Journal is delighted to present a paper which both explores a well-known clinical concept - Daniel Stern's ‘moment of meeting’ - in research terms, and which reports on an initiative to ‘dissipate’ that ‘discomfort’. The paper exemplifies the Journal's commitment to publishing work that is sound from a research perspective, and that captures the essence of the analytic idiom, here by using everyday clinical practice as the starting point of research.

In our regular Clinical and Theoretical Practice s