Editorial

We are pleased to present this first edition of 2001 in a new and larger format. We hope that readers will approve of the change which, as well as bringing the Journal into line with a more standard journal format, also gives us more space to publish papers, reviews and correspondence.

All the papers in this edition are concerned with challenging clinical situations and the demands they make on therapists to re-think their technique, theory and approach. This is not only a matter of adherence to a particular school of thought. These are critical life-and-death concerns: sometimes it is literally the patient's life that is at stake, at others it may be their psychic ‘aliveness’. It is, therefore, not surprising that discussion of these issues provokes strong feelings, as with the ‘Controversial Discussions’. However, it will be only through full and frank debate that our work will advance and in this spirit we have invited some senior members of the profession to write commentaries on Monica Lanyado's paper in response to the challenging issues she has raised. We hope that this debate might continue in the correspondence section so that the Journal can continue to develop as a forum for advancing our scientific knowledge to the benefit of all our patients and our profession.

This edition opens with Ann Horne's paper ‘Brief communications from the edge’ and is followed by Monica Lanyado's paper ‘The symbolism of the story of Lot and his wife’. Both Lanyado and Horne describe work with adolescents who are ‘on the edge’ and the struggle they had both to engage the patient and to remain in helpful therapeutic contact. Technical innovations are described which challenge a more orthodox psychoanalytic view of how certain communications by the patient might be handled: to what extent can these be contained within an interpretative stance or is some more concrete response needed? Does this kind of ‘demonstration’ need to precede interpretative work proper, taking account of th