Editorial

We are extremely pleased to publish last year's Journal of Child Psychotherapy research prize winning essay by Sarah Desmarais, ‘Hard science, thin air and unexpected guests: a pluralistic model of rationality, knowledge and conjecture in child psychotherapy research’. Desmarais compellingly proposes that child psychotherapy research would benefit from having recourse to an integrated research programme. Her erudite essay makes explicit how different strands of the research programme are underpinned by divergent methodological and epistemic assumptions. These underlying assumptions are teased out in a way that is both captivating and informative. Desmarais questions ‘the perceived incommensurability’ of these differing positions. The paper explores the possibilities for conceiving of child psychotherapy research in more pluralistic terms. An overarching framework is outlined, ‘where clinical, empirical, conceptual and interdisciplinary research’ are viewed as aspects of ‘a dynamic whole’, and where links can begin to be made between different investigative traditions.

In the next article, ‘The move to intersubjectivity: a clinical and conceptual shift of perspective’, Robin Balbernie argues that the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ developed by Trevarthen in the field of developmental psychology is the most comprehensive overarching concept for thinking about and understanding the inter-psychic processes that underpin the mother–infant relationship. Balbernie discusses the traditional psychoanalytic concepts of ‘holding’, ‘containment’ and ‘projective identification’ in relation to the interaction between mother and baby; he suggests that relevant and extremely important as these concepts are, they do not recognise or reflect the mother's or baby's proactive part in their interaction. Balbernie applies this putative ‘shift of perspective’ to the model of parent–infant psychotherapy in which the ‘identified patient’ is seen as the infant–parent relationship, and uses c