Editorial

This last issue of the Journal for 2013 is a great tribute to the changes in our thinking and our application of psychoanalytic theory in the clinical work that now takes place in so many different settings and with an increasingly wide range of patients and professionals. 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the Journal and we are pleased to include a rich edition with articles that reflect our development as a profession and our response to a changing world. We have papers on the experience of making a grant application for research, something that may well be of help to many of us who may face the prospect of such an undertaking before too long. There are papers on consultation in schools, on working with dissociative disorder in children, on how art can help us find a way to manage the many and increasing demands of our work and how film can be used in a wonderfully imaginative way to teach the concepts of psychoanalysis.

Elizabeth Edginton’s thought-provoking paper, presented at this year’s ACP conference, is a candid and lively account of the author’s experience of writing a National Institute of Health Research grant application for a randomised controlled trial feasibility study. Edginton usefully takes the reader through the key stages involved in developing the proposal, from the conceiving of the research project to the final elaboration of a written manual of the intervention to be tested. What brings the paper alive, however, are the author’s own unconscious-made-conscious associations to the process and her reflections on moving between the dual identities of clinician and researcher. Using a wide range of literary, cultural and psychoanalytic references, she poses a series of thought-provoking questions: does involvement in outcome research, as an individual, as an organisation and as a profession, ‘interrupt the clinical dyad’ of our more intimate case study research in a way that stirs up our most primitive Oedipal anxieties? What are the links between