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Welcome to Volume Seven of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. Our continuing aim is to offer you articles and contributions that are authoritatively informative, stimulate ideas and discussion, and consider the inter-relatedness of the couple and the family.
This issue's introductory articles describe the development of couple psychotherapy, as it emerged in response to the upheaval in couple and family relationships following the Second World War. Like Enid Eichholz and Lily Pincus, couple psychotherapy's founding mothers, our abiding focus is also on the needs of contemporary couples and families, and on how, and whether, psychoanalytic approaches can continue to address present-day difficulties during turbulent change.
The observation that rapid and chaotic change and uncertainty have an overwhelming impact on social and organisational systems is not new. Vaill first characterised the experience as like being in “permanent whitewater” (Vaill, 1989). Nevertheless, reflecting on the events of 2016, we now face continuing upheaval of even greater complexity. At a time when collaboration and joined-up thinking are all the more vital to humanity's survival, collective thinking becomes fractured.
As a profession, we are challenged to come together to appraise the applicability and global reach of psychoanalytic theory, the place of the client or patient in our ethical stance, and to allow an openness as practitioners to research and development such that we can confront our own destructive resistances to change. That is not to say that we concede to the management of anxiety through easy “quick fix” therapies. Time for reflection should be at the heart of all our profession's activities. Philosophies underpinning our ethical approaches suggest that survival should not only entail “getting through it”, but doing so with the least possible damage to the most vulnerable in our communities. Can we consider our guiding psychoanalytic paradigm, not as if it were a precious endan