Editorial

In November 2009 Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Health, in a speech delivered at the New Savoy Partnership Psychological Therapies Conference, announced that a broader range of psychological therapies will now be accessible to patients within the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. This now includes brief psychodynamic psychotherapy for depressed patients. This was a most welcome announcement. As we take stock of this significant development we must not lose sight that this good outcome has been hard won: colleagues have been persistently and passionately involved on behalf of our psychoanalytic communities with the Department of Health and related initiatives to ensure that we have a voice in shaping the future of mental health care in the UK. Not least we owe a huge vote of thanks to Jeremy Clarke who as Chair of the Savoy Partnership, as an advisor to the IAPT programme board, and as a member of the depression NICE guideline development group has managed to keep alive in the minds of all constituencies the important contribution of applied psychoanalysis to a modern healthcare system.

Our ‘battles’ are shared internationally: psychoanalysis and its applications are in danger of becoming marginalised in many countries. We are facing a crisis. In the UK this concern formed the backdrop to the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy NOW Conference that took place in London in June 2009. We are delighted to be able to publish in this issue some of the main papers presented at the conference by leaders in our field: Malcolm Allen (Chief Executive of the British Psychoanalytic Council), Michael Brearley (President of the British Psychoanalytical Society), Peter Fonagy (Freud Memorial Professor at UCL), Matthew Patrick (Chief Executive of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust), Mary Target (Professional Director of the Anna Freud Centre). Their papers address directly the challenges the profession faces and the issues we urgently need to add