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It was nine years ago that the first issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis appeared, an occasion eagerly anticipated by a specialist community of psychotherapists awaiting a regular international forum for professional exchange. While the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis was producing a tri-lingual online Revue for its members, this had limited penetration into an English-speaking constituency at that time. It was Molly Ludlam who proposed that the occasional papers produced by what was then the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists be transformed into an externally published, peer-reviewed journal, and it is she who, supported by a committed editorial and international advisory team, has steered this journal through the first decade of its life. We owe her a great debt of gratitude for taking and seeing through this initiative, and shouldering the lion's share of the work involved.
Hers is a hard act to follow, and it is with some trepidation that I agreed to take on, for a time-limited period, the role she has so ably performed in promoting internationally the theory and practice of working with couple and family relationships from a psychoanalytic perspective. The carrot that tempted me was her suggestion that there could be more special, themed issues of the journal, and her proposal that Shakespeare's “food of love”—music—might be an appropriate candidate for one of these. This, if you like, was music to my ears, and I readily volunteered to take on the task. Special interests have been the focus of four previous issues of the journal, the most recent, Volume 9(2), taking the life and work of the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott as its organising theme. It certainly won't be the last. One way of extending interest in our field is to address subjects that matter to a broad community of psychotherapists, and themed issues have the potential to do just that.
Perhaps a bridge between the focus of the last