Editorial

It is hard to bring my mind to the, usually, pleasurable task of writing an editorial because I am preoccupied with the Strategic Review happening in the Trust where I work. It strikes me now, however, that a number of the papers in this issue touch on themes relevant to my own preoccupations, themes that many clinicians and managers have been grappling with for a long time, but seem to be at the fore for me and my colleagues right now.

Time, and how we think about it, is the common thread I will use to link the papers in my description of them here. We begin with a paper which is the second of three instalments, following the story of ‘Sam’s’ 14 year treatment. There is a spaciousness and generosity in Holloway’s writing, which must be, at least partly, to do with the length of treatment and thus the time this has afforded him to reflect on the work. A 14 year treatment in Canada contrasts sharply with what Australian Ruth Schmidt Neven explores in her book on time limited psychodynamic psychotherapy, reviewed here by Maria Papadima. She is enthusiastic about this book as a thoughtful approach to austerity that is adapted to reality, unlike the notion that we could endlessly offer more for less, which Papadima likens to the parable of the five loaves and two fish. She writes: ‘As UK child and adolescent psychotherapists working within chronically underfunded public services, our dilemma is stark: do we overstretch ourselves and offer more and more, trying and failing to magically multiply the resource that exists? Or do we adhere to rigid boundaries, sticking to the required hours and patients per day and reserving traditional child psychotherapy for a limited few?’ I agree with reviewer and author that the former, like all manic flights from reality, is doomed to failure through burnout, while the latter involves both practical and ethical problems for public sector clinicians.

The joy of working in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy is that we receive papers from t