Editorial

Two of our book reviews found at the end of this issue discuss works which raise questions, concerns, and thoughts about the essential value and current practice of psychoanalytic work in the contemporary workplace. Marcus Evans’ Making Room for Madness in Mental Health looks at the role of psychoanalytic thinking in responding to the needs of psychotic patients and argues that psychoanalysis enables services to identify the institutional defences which can be unconsciously activated by ‘psychotic communications’. Psychoanalysis, the NHS and Mental Health Work Today, edited by Alison Vaspe, is even more explicit in its identification of the need for psychoanalytic thinking to alleviate some of the pressures felt by those working within the present-day UK National Health Service.

These book reviews allude to a fundamental hypothesis that in order to better understand the external results of internal processes, be it in a single psychotic patient, or a mental health service department, the causative processes, which may well be unconscious and unclear to those directly involved, need to be identified and explored. The tendency and, as both books make clear, prevailing institutional culture, may actually be the opposite of this; to focus on the surface, the external and the conscious. These two books may well be informed primarily by reference to UK workplaces, yet it is surely not a UK-only matter, this ongoing battle to justify the place of psychoanalysis and child psychotherapy within mental health services and mental health culture. But how to do it? How to explain, inform and demonstrate the importance of psychoanalytic thinking and clinical practice? The five diverse articles in this issue, serve as an exemplar of the range of responses that child psychotherapy can contribute to the debate.

We lead with the updated critical review of the evidence base for psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and adolescents compiled by Nick Midgley, Sally O’Keeffe, Lorna French