Editorial

The issues arising from the development of Freud's original formulation of the Oedipus complex continue to expand, and we open this August 1998 edition of the journal with a paper by Anne Alvarez, ‘Failures to link: attacks or defects? Some questions concerning the thinkability of Oedipal and pre-Oedipal thoughts’. In this paper the author offers an extension of the territory of our theoretical landscape by exploring Bion's theory of thinking. She points out some contradictions, and suggests ways in which what she calls ‘the modulating present object’ helps the infant move towards sequentiality, ordinality and twoness, as a precursor to the concept of absence and the notion of three. In the December Klein memorial edition we shall be publishing two further papers which take the Oedipus complex as their starting point.

The second paper in this edition was presented in an earlier form to the 1997 Annual Conference of the Association of Child Psychotherapists. In ‘Dialogues with parents’, Margaret Rustin offers an overview of current clinical approaches to psychoanalytically informed work with parents. As she points out, child psychotherapists, by virtue of their sensitivity to infantile features in the personality, possess a particular and proper basis for psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic work with parents, and this represents a shift in professional identity.

There has been much controversy surrounding the diagnosis and treatment of children thought to be suffering from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and it is now two years since there began, in this journal, a correspondence on the issues involved. In this edition we publish two papers which extend and inform this important debate. In ‘Wrestling with the whirlwind’, Eileen Orford describes some of the difficulties involved in making a correct diagnosis of ADD/ADHD and how it tends to be an over-diagnosed condition. Careful attention needs to be paid to each child's situation so that an understanding o