Editorial

On behalf of the Editorial Board, may I bid you welcome to Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. This new international Journal seeks to bridge the interests of couple and family psychotherapists and mental health workers in developing clinical practice informed by a psychoanalytic perspective. We are, therefore, inviting our readership to join in a creative and collaborative partnership to foster this new ‘offspring’.

Sponsored by the British Society of Couple Psychotherapists and Counsellors (BSCPC), this Journal has been born out of the society's sense of its developing identity. Formerly the Society for Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists (SCPP), the organisation produced, from 2005, four annual editions of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Couple Work. When, as BSCPC, the organisation expanded to include psychodynamic couple counsellors trained at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, and joined the British Psychoanalytic Council, it resolved to build on the considerable success of its earlier publication to develop a new journal, which would also embrace psychoanalytic family therapy.

This decision recognised the couple and family context in which training in our respective specialisms takes place throughout the world. In this regard, the UK finds itself sadly disadvantaged. Perhaps because we have developed separate professional training institutes, further professional development in couple and family psychotherapy has also become somewhat separate. In respect of this gap, perhaps the Journal can become an arena for expressing collaborative skills, as well as providing opportunities to share and learn from the experience of colleagues across the psychoanalytic world. It is surely not too fanciful to envisage that the bringing together of the creative entities of couple and family might serve to generate new ways of thinking.

This explains some of the thinking behind the linking of couple and family in our title. Several colleagues have also questioned why