Editorial

In response to an interpretation attempting to reconnect a patient with split-off aspects of himself, this insightful man wryly remarked: ‘Integration isn't all it's cracked up to be. Splitting keeps me sane!’.

This issue of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy is devoted to exploring the challenges posed by integration. This was the theme of a conference that framed these challenges in the context of the uncertain survival of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The physical setting for the conference itself – a rather beautiful 12th century church in a new housing estate in York – captured well the theme of integration, of old and new coming together. Organized by James Johnston in October 2009 with the Andrew Sims Centre in York, in partnership with the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS and the British Psychoanalytic Council, the conference provided a forum for an exploration of the challenge of integration from personal, interpersonal, paradigmatic and organizational perspectives – a forum that we hope this issue of the Journal will give our readers an opportunity to share.

Several of the papers we have included are revised versions of papers originally delivered at the conference, while others are not connected with the conference, but nevertheless resonate with its themes, speaking to the challenges and tensions that we as clinicians, researchers and theoreticians encounter every day as we try to develop and apply psychoanalysis in contexts that are more or less welcoming of it.

The merits of integration, as the patient observed, may well not feel as if they are what they are ‘cracked up to be’. Integration requires painful psychic work. In her last paper, On the sense of loneliness, Melanie Klein (1963) describes the lifelong tension between the urge towards integration and the impossibility of sustaining a state of integration:

Integration is difficult to accept. The coming together of destructive and loving impulses, and of the good and bad aspects of t