Editorial

I was recently invited to describe the contribution of psychoanalytic couple and family psychotherapy to repairing troubled intimate relationships at a meeting that considered systemic and psychoanalytic approaches to mental health. In essence, it meant considering aspects of the relationship between systemic and psychoanalytic modalities, and I found myself reflecting with some sadness on the ways in which we choose to inhabit conceptual silos to protect professional identities, rather than to form bridges from what we have in common. In doing so, I was reminded of Fairbairn's interest (1958), which Sutherland developed (1983), in the functioning of open and closed systems, and the importance for us all of maintaining open systems thinking in our personal, professional, corporate, and national lives.

It seems not insignificant that Sutherland was Medical Director of the Tavistock Clinic from 1947 till 1968, an important period in the development of couple psychotherapy. I would argue that open systems thinking is implicit in the concepts on which couple psychotherapy is built, although this is little reflected in the terminology it has adopted. Family therapy, which shares many of the antecedents of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is now, in practice, in the UK, more explicitly aligned with systemic thinking. On a wider world stage, however, particularly in the work of the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis in bringing couple and family practitioners together, there is a greater expression of the desire to retrieve and strengthen links between psychotherapeutic modalities. This journal is proud to be a part of that expression. It seems to be ever more crucial to be aware of the danger of closed system thinking, given what appear to be inadequate societal responses to continuing levels of family breakdown, poor investment in mental health, and an over-ready reaching for nationalistic solutions to international problems.

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