Editorial

This edition of the journal contains papers on a variety of clinical subjects as well as a special section on child psychotherapy in Russia and Hungary. Whatever part of the world child psychotherapists practise in, they are working within a specific social and political context. When this context is relatively benign, there is an assumption that free thought is a clinical right. It is therefore of great interest to hear about what has happened to clinical practice and theoretical thinking in countries where freedom of thought was politically severely limited for many years. This special section addresses some of these questions.

Catalina Bronstein and Sara Flanders' paper ‘The development of a therapeutic space in a first contact with adolescents’, presented at the Second European Conference on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Stockholm in September 1996, is a careful and thought-provoking description and clinical demonstration of their work with this notoriously difficult client group. Based on work developed at a walk-in centre, where adolescents in a state of crisis refer themselves, the theoretical foundations of the work are explored, and more detailed work with two adolescents is described as they become able to think about their difficulties in the contained space of a therapeutic consultation.

The theme of working with difficult adolescents is continued in Deborah Hindle's paper ‘Loss and delinquency: two adolescents’ experience of prison as an external container for psychic pain'. The author describes her work with two adolescent patients who were imprisoned during the course of their treatment. Both had suffered the tragic loss of their same-sex parent and the author discusses how this loss may have affected their ability to establish an ‘inner authority’. The paper describes these unusual treatments before, during and after imprisonment and emphasizes the importance of the professional network in which therapy took place. This fascinati