Editorial

The papers in this issue represent a range of creative approaches that clinicians in our field are taking to address and engage with the challenges faced, both in the consulting room and in the development of our profession. As we continue to tussle with the issue of writing about and publishing our clinical work in a way that is ethical, it is notable that none of the full-length papers included in this issue adopt the traditional single-case study format. While the restrictions we face in writing about our clinical work are undoubtedly a loss to our profession, it is heartening to see authors rise to the challenge this poses and write rich accounts of other kinds of work they are engaged in, or find new ways to address the topics that they want to explore. In addition, all three of the response pieces in this issue do contain clinical material for which consent to publish was sought and granted by families. While I hope this issue is unusual in not containing any single-case study papers, I also feel it challenges anyone who sees such a paper as the ‘gold standard’ for clinical exploration and theoretical development in our field and hope they will be enthused by what they read. This issue contains papers on research, which seek to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms by which psychoanalytic therapy works (Chourdaki et al., 2023; Miltz et al., 2023), interventions that have been developed within a psychoanalytic framework (Di Lorenzo et al., 2023; Sampaio de Carvalho et al., 2023), a paper on supervision (Salomonsson, 2023), and theoretical papers that use the medium of film as their clinical material (Smith, 2023) and explore the ethical publishing dilemma (Garcia, 2023). We have also reprinted the classic Kleinian paper ‘Thinking about a playroom’ by Betty Joseph (1998) and invited response pieces from some of our international readers.

The first four papers in this issue look at work targeted to the under-five population and their parents. Seemingly by coi