Editorial

I feel very proud to have been asked to take on the editorship of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. I hope I will be able to continue, with the help of a capable and experienced editorial assistant and editorial board, the high standards already established by my two predecessors, Mike Sinason and Robin Anderson, for this increasingly popular and respected journal.

As did both my predecessors, I work both in the public sector and in private psychoanalytic practice. I like to think that my public-sector work, for both the Health Service and the University of London, gives me a broad perspective on the difficulties and challenges facing our field. At the same time I see my psychoanalytic work as informing and enriching my clinical work and my thinking outside. In these troubled times it may be politically more popular to play down the importance of full four- or five-times-weekly analysis — which I see as not simply the historical source of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, but the active current spring which informs both the theory and the techniques that we use in our psychotherapeutic work.

I would echo Robin Anderson's concern, voiced in his farewell editorial, about radical and disturbing changes in the Health Service. Although I think we can be confident that psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a discipline will continue to flourish, whatever the political struggles it may encounter, my concern is that good-quality treatment will become less available to those people much in need, who are unable to pay. Many of us are also greatly concerned that the broader application of psychoanalytic ideas to work in the mental-health field, and other fields such as social work and education, will become less and less possible, as psychoanalytic psychotherapists are edged out in the private sector. I hope that Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy may continue to contribute to the growth of scientific knowledge that surely must ultimately give weight to the continued existence of our ways of unders