Editorial

In my last editorial, I wrote about the pleasure I take in my role at the Journal in seeing papers develop, sometimes over extended periods of time. The papers in this issue have reminded me how much I enjoy the fact that being part of the Journal has necessitated me spending a lot of time reading, which I otherwise might have considered a luxury. What we publish in the Journal is very varied, and while we occasionally run themed issues, there is often little to obviously connect papers other than their relevance to child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy. However, in the many hours spent preparing each issue, and in the discussions with my fellow Journal editors Lucy Mills and Krisna Catsaras, threads of connection can emerge which highlight aspects of concern or development within our profession.

In this issue, my fellow editors and I have been struck by the importance and respect the authors give to the consciously articulated narrative of their patients, even when this is starkly at odds with their understanding of the unconscious communications. Balancing the patient’s sense of ‘truth’ alongside the underlying story of their symptoms, and bringing these two more closely together, is in many ways the ‘bread and butter’ of our work. However, this balance has not always been well achieved in our clinical writing. This is partly about tone, but also the therapeutic attitude that comes across in the writing. While ethical publishing continues to be an issue that we grapple with, I remain optimistic that the way our profession is developing its writing style will allow us to continue to share our work without doing harm to our patients.

Another interesting aspect of this issue is that it contains three research papers and a clinical/theoretical paper, which has emanated from a piece of research, which is more than we tend to have. This fact only occurred to me in preparing this editorial, and came as something of a surprise, I think because of how clinically