Editorial

This first edition of the Journal of 2014 is a general one. It opens with another rich and thought-provoking paper by Graham Music in which he tries to demonstrate how psychoanalytic thinking can be combined not only with neurobiological research but also with recent understandings about executive functions. He links neuroscience with Freud’s theories about the ego. Music uses a detailed clinical case to show how important it is to work at the appropriate developmental level of a child where serious cognitive and emotional deficits, resulting from abuse and/or neglect, hamper the child’s most basic abilities to think. The combination of Music’s thoughtful analysis of therapy with a maltreated, developmentally compromised child earlier in his career and his present exceptional capacity to apply and communicate complex neuroscience to this work makes the article a real pleasure to read.

Music’s paper is followed by two articles in which research findings, as part of a professional doctorate in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy are presented. Amanda Keenan’s examines the impact of unresolved mourning on the adolescent development process after the death of a parent earlier in adolescence. Keenan uses a single case study to describe the themes that emerged and describes how these themes changed over the course of intensive psychotherapy.

Nick Sanderson’s article explores children’s responses to failed gratification. Sanderson puts forward the idea of two separate object relations positions in the face of such failure: schizoid and depressive. He uses process notes from training cases to produce a combination of clinical and theoretical research, demonstrating how the research was undertaken and presenting the findings. A content analysis is used to collect quantitative data about a child’s various responses to failures of gratification.

Gvion and Bar explore the presence of parents during the process of therapy both as supporters of the process and as remin