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This book represents the successful outcome of an idea and an ambition to publicize the current work of psychoanalysts in the public health sector. It is dedicated to William Brough and Richard Lucas, both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts working for many years in the National Health Service, who died before the book was published.
The book contains a varied selection of papers in which psychoanalysts describe how their analytic training and experience inform their work in the public sector across the UK. This is particularly relevant in an era when psychoanalytic psychotherapy and its applications are under threat alongside increasing fragmentation of services, with the resulting stresses on staff working in pressured environments with complex cases, often without sufficient support and training. The editors point out that there has been a long and distinguished tradition of psychoanalytic involvement in the public sector. However, it was surprising to notice the absence, in their list of earlier pioneers, of Donald Winnicott, Clifford Yorke, Anna Freud and Tom Main, all of whom have made major contributions to the treatment of children, families and adults within the public sector.
The editors' stated aim is to portray some of the ways in which psychoanalytic thinking and practice continue to flourish and to contribute to the day-to-day work of the NHS in the UK. Certainly the range of work described fulfils this aim, covering clinical work with parents, children, adolescents, adults and their families, the contributions of psychoanalytic thinking within the acute sector of the NHS, and psychoanalytic support and teaching offered to health service staff. Perhaps the only omission concerns work with the ethnically diverse populations and refugees who constitute an increasing number of referred patients.
The book is organized into four parts: clinical work with parents and children, clinical work with adults and their families, analytic thinking in health service pr