EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL

Over the years there have been many papers in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy which have focused on psychotherapeutic interventions with patients suffering from physical ailments. Indeed, not only have there been papers such as ‘My eyes are misting over’ (Zalidis 2002), ‘Thirty years of abdominal pain’ (Stern 2003), ‘Menstruation – the gap in the text?’ (Kerkham 2003), and ‘Exploratory ideas on the role of the psychotherapist in a heart-transplant team: Thinking aloud’ (Borghetti-Hiscock 2001), but the two most recent special issues of the journal have also focused on very particular somatic topics. The first special issue (Whyte 2004) was entitled ‘The facts of life. The impact of the therapist's pregnancy on the treatment of the borderline patient’, while the second special issue (Lawrence et al.2004) was on ‘Eating disorders’.

The current special issue is a collection of papers, all of which address, in one way or another, matters pertaining to the body. Some of the papers are clinically oriented (Borghetti-Hiscock, Zalidis, Frank), while others (Segal, Forssell) are more explicitly concerned with the relationships between health care professionals (e.g. trainee doctors or psychotherapists working with MS patients) and patients. In both sets of papers, there are patients described who are not ‘traditional psychotherapy patients’, and in all cases there is a description of using psychoanalytic ideas to inform the work, be it as a General Practitioner, a psychoanalyst or a psychotherapist working in a medical setting, or a Balint group facilitator.

Amongst the themes which recur in these papers are the following:

• The tension between maintenance of ‘traditional psychoanalytic technique’ and modifying such technique under unusual settings.

• The ability to make meaningful contact with patients who are suffering from a medical diagnosis, or who see their problems as entirely ‘somatic’.

• The countertransference difficulties, and pressure towards acting out when workin