Editorial

This edition of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy displays how diverse, and yet in some ways connected, the work that is being carried out in CAMH services and other mental health provision all over the United Kingdom is. We see in Campbell, Jones and Marsoni's papers practitioners engaged with children, adolescents and parents who have suffered in appalling ways. We also see how clinicians engage in work away from the consulting room, both revisiting and finding new value in concepts introduced by important predecessors, as Reeves does in his paper on Winnicott's concept of ‘riddance’, and engaging in new research as Anderson and Desmarais have done. In all cases, it is the ‘clinical relevance’ of this theoretical study that matters, and the authors show us how it can be used to further inform and enhance the work that we do in our consulting rooms.

Campbell's compelling case study of a suicidal female patient in late adolescence elaborates the concept of a ‘pre-suicide state’, and illustrates how this was experienced and enacted by the patient within the analysis itself. Campbell delineates the interaction between the developmental tasks of the female adolescent, the ‘nature and function’ of the pre-suicide fantasy which acts as a ‘motive force’ in the pre-suicide state, and the complex life-and-death transference resulting from a particular pattern of primal splitting and identification in the patient. The paper demonstrates the clinical relevance and serious danger, with suicidal female patients, of the fantasy of fusion with the idealised mother. Campbell discusses the link between the developmental role of the father in protecting the girl from the regressive pull towards timeless fusion, and the centrality of the paternal transference and the role of the analyst at the time of a pre-suicide state. He also considers the significant issue of his patient's identification with her own abusive and suicidal mother. This paper is a striking example of the way in wh