Editorial

This issue of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy concentrates on the subject of “Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the University Setting”. This was the title of a Study Day organised by the Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, in May this year, at Churchill College, Cambridge. University tutors, university counsellors, consultant psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, all contributed to the discussion of the difficulties of the university-student — his health and his breakdown — his capacity to think and its destruction. Some university campuses have counselling services, others have access to psychotherapy departments, and for some it is the tutor, untrained in psychology, who is left holding the adolescent baby.

For perhaps the first time in the United Kingdom, these various groups converged together for a joint sharing of views and perspectives. All participants had particular points of view, all had special skills, and all were under pressure. With the vast resources that are spent each year on the infra-structure of the university setting, it is salutary to step back and perceive that despite the great emphasis on learning and discovery and scholarship, only paltry attention is directed towards understanding the atmosphere in which the capacity for learning and study can develop.

The crisis of adolescence often emerges in the new beginning that the university offers. If the environment is not facilitating enough, the crisis can develop into an attack on thinking — an assault on the very root of the Academic Establishment as the student re-enacts the obstacles to development he has encountered.

In this country there is a veritable fruit salad of benign and malevolent tutors, counsellors, therapists, priests, with various degrees of dependence and interdependence from the institutions they serve. These services have developed in a disorderly and idiosyncratic way. The APP took the initiative in collecting the interested groups and provided three papers and space