Editorial

I begin my first editorial as Editor-in-Chief by extending my thanks to Alexandra de Rementeria who I succeed in this role. Alex rather bravely took on the job in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic when many people were feeling saturated with their responsibilities at work and at home. The Journal had been understaffed for some time and as a result it was behind schedule and morale was low. Alex worked hard with Maria Papadima (then Journal Editor) to ‘steady the ship’, and later went on to make significant contributions in developing thinking and debate within our pages on ethical publishing and equality, diversity and inclusion. Alex is a great champion of others, and I feel lucky to have been on the receiving end of this. I have learnt a lot from the sincerity of her depth of thinking, her capacity for gratitude, and her bravery. I wish her all the best as she takes on her new role as principal child and adolescent psychotherapist at Lambeth CAMHS.

This is a ‘general’ issue, meaning the papers have not been collected or organised around a particular theme, and are being published together simply because they are ‘ready’. It happens that this issue is noteworthy both in that it tackles issues that are challenging, such as gender dysphoria, and also in that we have contributions from authors who live in parts of the world currently at war. As a Journal we take no political position but do wish to support all therapists who continue to try and think about the minds and experience of others, especially children, young people and their families, while forces around them seek to obliterate such thinking.

The first paper in this issue is by Vera Fonseca, who writes from Brazil. She builds on the work of Klein and Meltzer in thinking about the development of our sense of space, both internally and externally, and how this has been compromised in children who go on to be diagnosed as autistic. This, she hypothesises, is due in part to their failure to introject the contai