Editorial

It is a pleasure and an honour to be asked to edit this special issue of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, which looks ahead to the 25th anniversary of the journal in 2009, and which we are celebrating by reprinting a selection of important papers from the early years of the journal. The journal began life in 1984, shortly after the inception of the Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS (APP) under its first Chair, John Steiner. It was always the intention of the APP to have a journal which would represent psychoanalytic thinking and its applications in the NHS, in part because such public sector work was not represented in this country by the existing psychoanalytic and psychotherapy journals. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy has continued and flourished over the past 24 years, and has become firmly established as a highly respected journal representing psychoanalytic work, in all its forms and applications, in the public sector, under a series of distinguished editors (Michael Sinason, Robin Anderson, Jane Milton, Marilyn Lawrence, and the current editor, Maureen Marks), who have maintained the high quality of papers published.

This issue comprises a selection of important papers from the first 10 years of the journal, concentrating on the initial years (three of the five papers come from 1984–1985), when its circulation and readership were considerably lower than they are now. For this reason, we thought it was worthwhile to reprint important papers which many (perhaps most) current readers would not know about, and also to bring to readers' attention that all issues of the journal, from 1984 onwards can now be accessed, by APP members, online via the APP website.

This selection is of course personal and somewhat arbitrary, but the papers I have chosen are exceptional, I think, in their clarity, precision of thinking, and clinical usefulness. All address issues of fundamental importance to us as teachers and practioners of analytic work in the NHS, and al