Editorial

With the opening of the third millennium, in Volume 26 Number 1 of the Journal, we are pleased to present a spectrum of papers which both link with past concerns and address those which will continue to preoccupy us as a profession as we embark on our fifty-first year of practice.

We begin with a timely paper on the origins of violence in the psyche: ‘Broken links’ by Suzanne Maiello from Rome. In her paper the author takes up a debate which is also at the forefront of public concern. By linking her own and a supervisee's work with contemporary events in Italy, she offers further thinking on the important differences between ‘aggression’ which is essentially an object-related emotion, and ‘destruction’, where notions of linking have either been destroyed or never existed. This results in a dissociated mindless state where the loss of the object engenders states which are incomprehensible, incommunicable and inaccessible.

We inaugurated the correspondence section of the Journal (Vol. 22 No. 1 1996) with Robert Furman's letter about the prescription of Ritalin in the States and his concerns about what appeared to be its over-use as a solution to difficulties with children diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Further correspondence ensued (Vol. 22 No. 2 1996) and also two papers on the subject (Vol. 24 No. 2 1998). We are pleased to continue the debate in this issue with the publication of Maria Pozzi's paper ‘Ritalin for whom?’, in which, through her work with two families of children under 5 in London where the Ritalin option had been offered, she and the families struggle with the internal dynamics which are often externalized as a tension between psychological and pharmacological approaches. As she observes, short-term psychodynamic family counselling of the kind she describes has great value in a climate of financial restrictions.

Picking up the theme of endings from the last edition (Vol. 25 No. 3 1999), Roberta Mondadori's paper ‘Let