Editorial

After five years as Founding Editor of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Michael Sinason is stepping aside. The dedication and skill needed to start a new journal is enormous, and the APP was fortunate to find in Dr Sinason someone who had both experience in publishing and who was a respected psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Under his guidance Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy is now a well established and respected Journal.

I am very pleased to have the opportunity of becoming the new Editor and very mindful of the responsibility this places on me.

These are difficult and challenging times for everyone working in the National Health Service and other ‘public sector’ institutions. It is ironic when a recent Radio 4 documentary on psychotherapy could speak of the ‘psychotherapy revolution’ and of the ‘veritable mushrooming’ of interest in psychotherapy that so many psychotherapy services, some with international reputations, should be threatened with closure or severe cuts.

Often psychotherapy and related services are having to compete with the more dramatic demands of medicine and surgery; and professionals frequently find it hard to feel they are fighting for equally valuable and valid causes. These battles will continue to be fought locally and nationally, and the APP will continue to take a leading role in these campaigns.

I think it is more important than ever that we should be protecting not only our own work but the standards of our work. I believe the most important function of a Journal such as this is to protect and develop the standard of discourse of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. John Steiner (personal communication) has described the scientific basis of the field of psychotherapy as ‘soft’ because our data is linked to such personal attributes as feelings. We feel very vulnerable when we have to stand up for ourselves against those using so-called ‘hard’ data, which can be statistically verified. And yet we also know that if we try to move towards the ‘hard science