Editorial

This general edition of the Journal has an apparent mix of themes but there are developmental links between them along the lines of communication, attachment, loss and the retrieval of the good object.

In the first paper, Elena Molinari examines the processing and containing of emotions and sensations in work with autistic children. She hypothesises that babies develop the means to process experience via containment: proto-containment – the sensory, imitative aspect of the earliest relationship – and containment which propels their emotions towards something meaningful (♀/♂) through the α function, projection and introjection. Molinari’s hypothesis is that the autistic child is unable to move between these two forms of containment. She uses a clinical case to explore this hypothesis, examining the therapeutic process and the countertransference of the therapist. She describes how, through this work, she came to understand that the development of introjective and projective functions is core for the development of the psychic container. Molinari compares the way in which the communication of feelings through action in therapy can ‘cross the void’ in a way similar to what happens in an artistic performance.

The next article provides an example of a piece of research with real practical application. Carol Broughton’s paper succinctly explains the genesis, construction and preliminary reliability testing of the Parent–Infant Relational Assessment Tool (PIRAT), a clinical measure, predicated on psychoanalytic understanding, attachment theory and clinical research, designed to identify risk in the early parent–infant relationship. Broughton outlines the beginnings of the assessment tool in the Parent Infant Project at the Anna Freud Centre in 1997 where the need was identified for a flexible, reliable and validated measure to facilitate the transfer of knowledge about infant research and to allow health professionals to identify and highlight areas of concern about parent–i