Editorial

As Couple and Family Psychoanalysis embarks on its eighth volume, 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Family Discussion Bureau (FDB), the forbear of Tavistock Relationships. It was one of a number of organisations to be set up in the late 1940s out of concern about the increasing breakdown in family and couple relationships. On parallel paths, the Marriage Guidance Council developed from 1938 into a UK-wide organisation to become Relate in 1988; and in Scotland, Couple Counselling Scotland later became Relationships Scotland, in order to bring together training and couple counselling services with Family Mediation. This year, we celebrate the setting up in 1948, by the Family Welfare Association, of the FDB so that it could focus on relationship breakdown. Like its sister bodies, the FDB has evolved through a series of changes, recently becoming Tavistock Relationships (TR). This issue of the Journal acknowledges Nina Cohen who sadly died in November 2017. Her work contributed significantly to TR's development during the time when it was known as the Institute of Marital Studies, Christopher Clulow has collated for this issue an affectionate appreciation of her life.

There is an interesting story to be told, although not here, about how organisations that were set up to promote couple and family relationships have embodied, and perhaps been obliged to reflect, the sometimes interdependent, sometimes ambivalent, relationships between the couple and the family. Their professional task has been simultaneously to promote the nevertheless differing training and service requirements of separate psychotherapeutic modalities that are geared to the particular needs of the child or the adult, the individual or the couple, the family or the group. Perhaps the coming-of-age of the couple per se, in psychotherapeutic terms, has paralleled its social individuation and moving away from the family. Despite this Journal's aspirations and best intentions, it a