Editorial

Editing a general issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis is both fascinating and challenging: fascinating, because the themes of the articles are diverse and often surprising; challenging, because it can be difficult to find an editorial thread that connects them. What is presented to the reader is a snapshot of work that is currently going on in the relatively small but growing field that unites our community of couple and family psychotherapists.

As always, it tends to be what is new and different that attracts attention. So it is appropriate that this issue opens with an article from a Brazilian author who has not previously published in the field of couple and family psychoanalysis. Eva Chaska Uchitel Tesch is the first winner of the New Writer Prize, an initiative taken by the founding editor of the journal, Molly Ludlam, in 2020 (a year that contains numbers associated with vision). The editors are delighted to publish this article, whose author was profiled in the previous issue of this journal. What is described is a brief, psychoanalytically informed intervention with a family, which was conducted online. Link theory and object relations concepts are drawn upon to focus attention on the intersubjective nature of encounters that were significantly affected by the enforced medium of online therapy. The comment of the Awards Panel—“we were immediately engaged by the author's refreshing spirit of curiosity about whose suffering she was being asked to address, and by her spontaneous capacity to adapt to limitations”—is likely to be endorsed by the experience of reading this article.

Psychoanalysis and developmental psychology share a concern with the relationship between internal and external realities. Within the clinical setting, the starting point is often to hear how people speak about their experiences as an expression of unconscious conflicts arising within their inner worlds. Famously, Freud (1900a) described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious”