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We are very pleased to introduce our first clinical commentary, a new feature that we hope will appear regularly in the journal and encourage debate and discussion. The idea of course is not new; the British Journal of Psychotherapy, amongst others, has for many years had such a section, and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis has recently introduced a similar format. The idea of critical debate amongst readers is also not new to the JCP; in recent years we have published a lead clinical paper followed by several commentaries on the leading paper (vol. 27, no. 1), and in 1999 we published a symposium on ‘Frustration’ in which three authors (Anne Alvarez, Anne Harrison and Edna O'Shaughnessy) wrote of their different views of this concept.
We hope that these clinical commentaries are within this same spirit of open debate. The format we have used for this issue is that a clinician has anonymously presented a single session as well as some background, and we have asked three senior members of our profession to offer brief commentaries on what they found in the material. In this issue the commentators chosen all have links with different training schools; the aim is not to present ideological views that represent entrenched positions, but rather that discussion and original thinking might be fostered, and we think that this is certainly the case in these commentaries. The format we have used this time is not written in stone and may change, and so feedback would be appreciated, but the overall aim is to maintain a section within the journal in which debate, dialogue and the mutual exchange of ideas can flourish.
The name and background details of the patient have been disguised, and the therapist's name not given, in order to preserve patient confidentiality.