Editorial

I had the good fortune to be taking up my role at a point when this issue had already been conceived and was taking shape. My predecessor, Lydia Hartland-Rowe and our Editor, Maria Papadima, had invited short papers about the impact of the pandemic on the work of child psychotherapists in the UK and around the world. Like a short report from the frontline, these papers have immediacy. As a collection, they serve as a snapshot of what has been possible during this time, but I have also been surprised and impressed by how much reflection and processing is already entrained. It will, of course, be a very long time before we understand the scale or detail of how the pandemic has affected our world. We might expect that it will be longer still before we can really understand how we responded in the consulting room and why. However, these papers give us a sense of where we are now and how fruitful such explorations are going to continue to be.

This issue begins with a review of the literature available, pre-pandemic, on technology mediated therapy, by Maria Pozzi Monzo and Sara Micotti. Most of the subsequent short papers in this issue describe individual work with children and young people and these are loosely organised under the headings: The experience of the therapist, and: The setting, technology and the body. There are a further three papers describing infant observation, group work and supervision during the pandemic. Each set of papers begins with a commentary, drawing out the themes of each paper, so I will not address that here. Instead, in this editorial, I want to describe what excites me about these papers as a collection.

All authors seem to share a central theme regarding the way that remote work brought the loss of, and consequent need to reimagine, the psychoanalytic frame. Some might argue that making this choice – to work remotely – was a manic defence; that we failed to mourn what we could not save. If there are clinicians who chose not to offer any wor